The College Student Who Defeated the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon
5/1/202637 min
Last year, a massive cyberweapon terrorized the internet. It launched thousands of DDoS attacks, threatening tens of millions of people around the world. The weapon came to be known as Kimwolf. WSJ’s Robert McMillan reports that cybersecurity experts were stumped. Kimwolf’s attacks seemed to be launched from millions of internet-connected devices like TV boxes, cameras and picture frames. Eventually, the experts got help from an unlikely ally: a 22-year-old college senior named Benjamin Brundage. Jessica Mendoza talks to Ben about how he might have saved the internet. To check if your network is secretly connected to a residential proxy network, here are a few tips. Further Listening:
- Cybersecurity Braces for AI ‘Bugmaggedon’ - ‘Hack Me If You Can’ from The Journal Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJessica Mendoza· Host0:00
[music] When a big cybersecurity threat emerges, the people in charge of taking it down are the engineers and network operators who keep the internet running.
Robert McMillan· Guest0:14
I think of them as wizards, the wizards of the internet.
Jessica Mendoza· Host0:18
[laughs] That's our colleague, Bob McMillan, who covers cybersecurity, and he says that over the last year, the wizards of the internet faced something at a scale they had never encountered before. It was called Kimble.
Benjamin Brundage· Guest0:32
[music] Kimble.
Speaker 30:34
Kimble.
Jessica Mendoza· Host0:35
A fast-growing botnet called Kimble.
Speaker 40:38
One of the most extreme botnet operations ever observed.
Jessica Mendoza· Host0:42
What makes Kimble different is how it spreads.
Speaker 40:46
Quietly hijacking nearly two million Android devices across the globe. The scale alone is staggering.
Jessica Mendoza· Host0:53
What the internet wizards saw was a somewhat familiar threat, a network of bots engaging in distributed denial of service attacks.
Robert McMillan· Guest1:03
So DDoS attacks are basically when you get a bunch of computers and they flood another computer with just, like, junk data, like, "Hey, could you send me this webpage?" And that junk data eventually slows down the computer to the point where it doesn't work. They sort of flood the zone with, with internet traffic, and then the target doesn't work anymore.
Jessica Mendoza· Host1:23
But Kimble's attacks were strange because they were coming from millions of devices,