Kaiji

Kaiji is the name of a newly discovered botnet project that is believed to be the product of a Chinese programmer. What is unique about Kaiji is that it does not seem to borrow modules and code from other botnet projects – this is a very common strategy nowadays because of the large number of open-source botnet projects available online. Surprisingly, the developers of the Kaiji botnet have opted to use the Go programming language to create their threatening tool from scratch – Kaiji targets a wide range of Internet-of-Things devices by using several payloads that are compatible with different CPU architectures.

The size of the Kaiji botnet is small relatively for now, but it is very likely that the authors of the project will work to expand its size in the near future. At the moment, Kaiji does not rely on any known exploits to infect new systems – instead, it scans the Web for accessible SSH services, and then tries to brute-force their login credentials. The brute-force attack is executed by targeting the default 'root' account and trying a series of frequently used passwords or default login credentials.

Cybersecurity experts suspect that the Kaiji might be under development because it seems to malfunction very often – the payload may sometimes cause the compromised system to crash, and the control server of Kaiji also tends to go down very often. Last but not least, the Kaiji botnet's Distributed-Denial-of-Service modules are not fully finished yet.

Botnets like Kaiji are becoming a very frequent occurrence – protecting your network can be done by applying the latest firmware updates and security patches, as well as making sure that you are using secure login credentials.