The Mirai botnet was a piece of malware that infected hundreds of thousands of devices across the internet and used them to take down websites by overloading the websites with illegitimate requests for service. The malware primarily targeted insecure devices linked to the “Internet of Things”, whose default passwords could be found online and were rarely changed if ever. While companies that protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks exist, the sheer scale of the Mirai botnet forced multiple companies to cease their protection of websites under attack due to the huge number of devices making requests. Cybersecurity against such distributed attacks poses a difficult challenge, as the attacks can silence speech that is found to be distasteful or objectionable while the attackers themselves are numerous enough to drown out legitimate requests to the site under attack.
