Botnet launches DDoS attacks from thousands of Android devices

Researchers have discovered a botnet that ran on more than 100,000 Android devices and used their internet connections to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The botnet, called WireX was used to launch distributed denial of service attacks by spamming out HTTP GET requests until website connections crumbled under the load. It included around 120,000 IP addresses across 100 different countries.

Researchers from Akamai, Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Google, Oracle Dyn, RiskIQ, Team Cymru, and others joined forces to combat the botnet.

Google recently deleted around 300 apps from the official Play Store which were used to create the botnet. Many of the identified apps fell into the categories of media players, ringtones, or tools such as storage managers and app stores with additional hidden features that were not readily apparent to the end users that were infected.

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