Hackers claim knocking thousands in UK offline was an accident

A cyberattack targeting Talk Talk and the Post Office recently saw some of the two firms' customers briefly taken offline. Two hackers, allegedly behind a new IoT botnet, created from the strain of the infamous Mirai malware, have belatedly claimed responsibility for the attack. However, the hackers reportedly claim that the attack was accidental.

According to a report by Motherboard, one of the hackers, going by the pseudonym Best Buy apologised for the "unintentional" attack. "Sorry for UK Post Office," the hackers said. "But they should give their customers better hardware :".

Best Buy claimed "too many requests freeze the s****y routers," which caused the outage. He also claimed the incident occurred when he and his cybercriminal colleague Popopret attempted to enlist more vulnerable devices into their new botnet, which they now call Annie instead of Mirai.

The hacker duo reportedly claim to having gained a 4.8 million bot strong army of compromised devices. This number, however, is yet to be verified. The hacker duo are also believed to be renting out access to their new Mirai botnet successor, which may likely lead to future attacks.

Talk Talk and the Post Office have confirmed the attack. While Talk Talk acknowledged that a "small number" of its customers' routers were affected by Mirai, a spokesperson for the Post Office said that a "third party" was responsible for the disruptions, which affected "certain types of routers."

The new wave of cyberattacks, leveraging Mirai, come on the heels of large-scale Mirai-powered attacks, which caused massive outages across the globe, even briefly taking the entire internet of Liberia offline. Cybercriminals first began flexing Mirai's power after a massive attack nearly shut down the US internet.

Following Mirai's source code being made publicly available by its alleged creator the pseudonymous hacker Anna_Senpai, hackers have taken to creating rival botnet armies to conduct large-scale attacks. Security researchers tracking Mirai's propagation indicate that a new wave of attacks from Mirai-powered botnets may likely be in the offing.