Akamai discovers Dark Frost botnet exploiting gaming platforms

June 1, 2023

Akamai’s security intelligence response team recently has alerted the general public of Dark Frost, a botnet that has corrupted over 400 machines.

This botnet primarily targets the gaming sector, including game developers, game server providers, and internet broadcasters. The revelation throws light on the actions of a person in their early twenties living in the United States who claims to have a few years of development expertise. Dark Frost’s creator aims to commercialize the botnet by providing it as a DDoS-for-hire and spamming tool, aggressively marketing these illicit activities, and even publishing images of supposed bank transactions as proof.

Dark Frost is inspired by a number of well-known malware strains, including Gafgyt, QBot, and Mirai. It is made up of hacked devices that run on various architectures like as ARMv4, x86, MIPSEL, MIPS, and ARM7. The botnet is built by stealing code from well-known malware families, giving the attacker the capacity to successfully execute assaults against the gaming sector.

Using UDP flood assaults, Dark Frost can inundate a server with a massive amount of traffic, reaching an astounding pace of 629.28 Gbps. The server is inundated with a tremendous stream of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets in these assaults.

Allen West, an Akamai security researcher, mentioned these findings.

The sources for this piece include an article in TechRepublic.

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Jim Love

Jim is an author and podcast host with over 40 years in technology.

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