Checkpoint reports that a new threat dubbed Reaper or IoTrooper is spreading at an alarming rate. Its a Worm that is infecting the unsuspecting devices connected to internet including Webcams, Baby Monitors, Refrigerators and even the Routers. The worm is creating a an army of millions of inert bots that can wake up – on the whims of their creators – and wreck havoc on internet.
The simplest attack from this bot army would be that of a Denial of Services (Distributed Denial of services in this case) where suddenly all the infected devices would start making same kind of request to the target servers, exceeding its capacity to answer the requests, leading to a crash of the services provided by the targeted servers.
These bot armies have been behind some of the most damaging cyber attacks against organizations worldwide, including hospitals, national transport links, communication companies and political movements.
It has been estimated that millions of devices have already been infected by the worm. More are being compromised everyday. The worrying factor, however, is the sophistication of the code.Researchers are sure that the infestation can carry out a DDOS attack, the code may be capable of doing something much more nefarious.
Since the attack is targeting mostly IoT devices which are neigher easy to patch nor have regular update, chances of the threat going away any time soon is not there
