Attackers Leverage Open Source in New BYOB Attack

An attack leveraging the open-source Build Your Own Botnet (BYOB) framework has reportedly been intercepted by Israeli cybersecurity firm Perception Point’s incident response team. According to the team, this appears to be the first time the BYOB framework has been found to be used for fraudulent activity in the wild. While these tactics and techniques have historically been limited in used to financially backed advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, they are now more easily accessed by novice criminals, in part because of the more widespread popularity of plug-and-play hacking kits, researchers said. In July, a BYOB framework that implements all the building blocks needed to build a botnet was developed to improve cybersecurity defenses; however, what is used by defense can also fall into the hands of those with more malicious intentions. The continued growth of these hacking kits allows any script kiddie or malicious attacker to leverage this framework and carry out attacks that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.