Hackers Say Knocking Thousands of Brits Offline Was an Accident

A new zombie army of hacked Internet of Things devices forced thousands of Brits offline, as hackers tried to expand the reach of their botnet.

The UK internet providers TalkTalk and Post Office confirmed that some of their customers experienced outages due to a cyberattack. One of the hackers who controls said they were responsible for the issues.

“Sorry for UK Post Office,” a hacker who goes by the name BestBuy told Motherboard in an online chat, explaining that they didn’t target them “intentionally.”

“But they should give their customers better hardware :\,” the hacker said.

BestBuy explained that “too many requests freeze the shitty routers,” and that they were just trying to enlist more devices into their botnet. The hacker said that they now call the modified malware Annie instead of Mirai, and that they have collected as many as 4.8 million bots. (Motherboard could not verify this figure, but it’s way higher than any other number reported before, so worth taking with a grain of salt.)

TalkTalk confirmed that “a small number” of customer’s routers were affected by Mirai. A Post Office spokesperson said a “third party” disrupted some customers on Nov. 27, impacting “certain types of routers.”

”They should give their customers better hardware :\ [...] Too many requests freeze the shitty routers.”