Larry Pesce remembers the day when the distributed denial of service (DDoS) threat landscape changed dramatically. It was late fall in 2016 when a fellow researcher joined him at the InGuardians lab, where he is director of research. His friend wanted to see how fast Mirai, a novel internet of things (IoT) botnet installer, would take over a Linux-based DVR camera recorder that was popular with medium-size businesses. So, she brought in a purchased DVR, then they set up observation instrumentation before connecting it to the internet via the DVR’s span port.
