John McAfee Points Finger over Massive DDoS Attack

On Friday (21st October), a malicious party was responsible for a huge DDoS attack on Managed DNS infrastructure provider Dyn, taking out sites like Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, and reddit in the process. The attack – which Dyn described as “global in nature” – involved tens of millions of IP addresses infected by the Mirai botnet. The perpetrator is yet to be uncovered.

Thankfully, though, everyone’s favourite consulting detective, weird Libertarian John McAfee, is on the case. McAfee claims to know – through his “sources” – who was responsible for the attack, and reveals that it was merely a warm-up for an even bigger, more devastating attack on the internet.

McAfee told Social Media Week:

“My sources say that Bureau 121, the Korean State hacking group, is responsible. Further they left false trails pointing to Backconnect, an American company, as being responsible. If all evidence points to this American company, then, with 100% certainty, it is not them. Anyone who is capable of carrying out a hack of such sophistication is also capable, with far less effort than that involved in the hack, of hiding their tracks or making it appear that the hack came from some other quarter. The forensic tools used to assign culpability in a hack are well known, in the cybersecurity world, to be largely ineffective. They may, sometimes, correctly identify an unsophisticated 15-year-old as the source of a hack, such as the teenager who hacked the FBI less than a year ago. But they are completely ineffective against large, sophisticated groups of hackers such as those run by the Korean State. Backconnect has a history of spoofing IP addresses, so they make a perfect fall guy.

I also believe that this attack was the harbinger of near future attacks that will be much more devastating. I believe the smaller prior attacks served to identify weaknesses in the Internet’s infrastructure. Clearly there are weaknesses. Anticipate that these will be exploited in a big way.”

Last month, cybersecurity expert Bruce Scheler warned that an unknown group was planning an attack designed to take out the whole internet, reporting that “major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them,” and that the attacks “look like probing” to test the defences of such companies.