Emotet first appeared in 2014, but like Zeus, it is now a common program that is widely used to deliver other types of malware, with Trickster and Ryuk being two prominent examples. Emotet is so good at what it does that Arne Schoenbohm, head of the German Federal Office for Information Security, calls it “the king of malware.”
10. Mirai botnet (2016)
All the viruses and other malware we’ve discussed so far infect what we think of as “computers” — the PCs and laptops we use for work and play. But in the 21st century, there are millions of devices with more computing power than anything a Creeper could infect. These internet of things (IoT) devices are ubiquitous, overlooked, and often misguided for years.
The Mirai botnet was actually similar to the other early malware we discussed in that it used previously unknown vulnerabilities and caused more damage than its creator intended. In this case, the malware found and hijacked IoT gadgets (mainly CCTV cameras) whose default passwords had not been changed. Paras Jha, the college student who developed the Mirai malware, intended to use the botnets he created for DoS attacks that would help settle scores in the murky world of Minecraft server hosting, but instead unleashed an attack focused on a major DNS provider as well. traversed most of the east coast of the US online for the better part of a day.
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