Vince Vintage – Minecraft’s Most Notorious Hacker

In 2016 the entire internet in the east coast the united states goes offline for hours it’s unlike anything ever seen and then just a week later the entire country of liberia goes offline for a week people think this is the work of north korea china but everyone had it so wrong

Because reality was much different it was just a 19 year old kid in his dorm room that made this malware trying to make a little bit of money playing minecraft and it got out of hand and that’s the story i’m telling you about today the mirai botnet

One of the worst botnets we have ever seen and it continues to affect us to this day this story starts at a rutgers university para straw he’s a computer science student and gets a full ride there and like any kid in college needs to pay some bills

So we get to side job but for him this was a dream job he was to get a job working at a minecraft server programming you see in minecraft anyone can set up their own server and we can charge players to come on charging for upgrades and there is

Big money to be made we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars a month you could make and a lot of these servers are ran by 18 20 year old kids so competition is tough and ethics are out the window so much so that they’re willing to pay hackers big

Money to take down the competition hackers are what they’re called booter services would get paid the ddos rival servers and kick off all the customers online and then those players would hopefully funnel over into your server and this is a known thing that even for the hackers minecraft is

Pretty big money so part of sees this going down he’s pretty shocked i mean he always grew up as a good kid always wanting to do the right thing he thinks to himself why not protect these servers from these ddos attacks because he saw how rampant they were

So in 2016 para starts protraff solutions a ddos protection firm protecting minecraft servers from these ddos attacks but then a year goes by and business is damn tough because paris is on the verge of going out of business he completely underestimated the competition within the ddos protection space you had other

Companies like proxy pipe and ovh paris customers were leaving and going to he was losing so many customers that he was about to go bankrupt so to prevent that from happening he messages all of his co-workers to see if they have anything around the office they could sell so one of his co-workers

He comes back with an offer that pars can’t refuse he says that he’s been building a botnet secretly for the last couple of months and he knows some people that are willing to pay them 10 to 20 grand to use the spot net and hack for hire now paris was pretty shocked because

What he was suggesting was that they do the exact thing that their company sets out to protect but he needed the money back i mean he couldn’t let his parents down he couldn’t let this business fail and all of his employees down so he justifies it

To himself saying you know what we can just build this out do it maybe for a couple of months make some money and never tell anyone inject the money back in the protraff though if they were to really do this they couldn’t do it under his real name so hackers have two

Names that go by their real name and their online name so paris’s online name was anna senpai from some hentai or something so now with their identities underway they made a fake docs leading to a kid in turkey facebook account reddit account hack farms account they were ready to go what they were

Building was what the fbi would say is the manhattan project of botnets now what made mirai so deadly see a botnet is just a collection of online devices that can point all the web traffic they could generate at one website or service and take it offline and botnets before mirai were made with

Using pcs of computers but people take security a lot more seriously on that than they would their smart watch their smart mug with the advent of all the internet of things smart devices we have mirai was taking advantage of those it would run a list of 300 usernames and passwords from the manufacturer

Against all of these devices online and if anyone never changed the password it would be infected with mirai now using that technique mirai built itself to be over 750 000 infected devices now with mirai built it’s time to make a little bit of money so they were charging what’s called

Seats on a booter service which is the botnet so these seats can go anywhere from a thousand to five thousand a week and they were charging this to rival minecraft servers to take down their competition and paris is making really good money he’s probably making 10 to 30 grand a

Week at this point but just like in breaking bad this is a good luck for you once you make a little bit of easy money it is really hard to stop because it’s almost an addiction at that point so remember all those customers that left pro traffic in the first place

That went to his rival competitors paris wants to win them back but through something uh it’s very unique a friendly extortion where the customer didn’t know about it he would attack the rival ddos protection firms go to the companies that they were clients of and

Say hey i saw that you guys got hacked you guys use this person to protect you we can protect you even better at protraff and he was stealing customers by the dozens from these huge companies anna senpai was a tyrant or paris because if you didn’t leave and go to

Pro traffic anna senpai would come to you the next week with a lovely extortion email saying we are going to ddos the hell out of your website and if you don’t pay up within 24 hours it’s gonna be 10 bitcoins and if you don’t pay within four hours after the

Attack it’s going to be double the 20. paris is making crazy money at this point we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a month but what he was doing was loud people were noticing servers are getting taken down ddos protection firms are noticing that their customers in whole

Are leaving to go into protraff some small scrappy startup ran by a kid in the storm room so pars realizes he needs to cool down for a bit and in a complete shock he gets the source code for the mirai bot at the worst spot and we’ve ever seen

And puts it out on hack forms for free for anyone to download and at that point paris wrote a letter saying he was stepping out of the ddos for a higher world he was done with the game that was the last time we ever saw him today it’s rumored that he’s in

With a chilean escort down in the lovely country of argentina i’m just kidding now with mariah out of his hands paris went to less noisy money making schemes mainly involving click fraud where blogs and other websites will hire his botnet to do fake clicks on the ad so

The blog owner gets all the revenue and he’s doing this and now he’s making really good money and it’s a lot quieter but with mariah out in the wild it was taking a life of its own people were using the botnet source code and repurposing it into even

Worse botnets that were deadlier than before now they were taking down entire banks all throughout the european union they were shutting down the internet in the east coast in the united states they shut down the entire country of liberia wrecking the only undersea internet cable going into the country now all the

Authorities of the world were fearful of this because this is around the 2016 election in the united states so obama specifically stated that they needed to get this figured out because they could not have this botnet effect election day the fbi gets that overtime pay they need to solve this

Case and who was the creator of the mirai botnet now the problem with trying to figure out who it was was that a lot of the infected devices were held in overseas countries mainly in indonesia and malaysia so for the fbi to actually prosecute this case they needed to find

One infected device within the united states that they could take as evidence so they waited around for weeks and then it came to months and they find one device that came available in alaska so fbi agents fly up to alaska and then fly into a remote town

On a boat plane into a town that barely had electricity they find the infected device in alaska and then it roots out to a vpn node in france and then from there they found the command and control server leading back to paris and a senpai at this point they had him cornered so

When the fbi came there to arrest him his parents could not believe it and they’re seeing their son being walked out of the house in handcuffs so during the court case paris was incredibly helpful he was giving them everything they needed to solve not only his crime that he committed

But also other botnets for hire he opened up an entire world of these ddos for hire industry to the fbi so when it came down to the sentencing they begged for leniency because he was facing up to anywhere from 25 to 30 years in prison so it came down to the sentencing and

The judge gave him four months of home confinement four years of community service and a 8.9 million dollar restitution to pay though is the story of mariah over far from it the source code for marie makes up 70 to 80 of all botnets still to this day and

People are repurposing it into even stronger botnets committing click fraud using them to take down websites and services it was truly the pandora’s box that paris had released and i think it’s mainly impressive that you have a kid that was in his early 20s in college that made something that

Governments around the world thought was the work of some nation state trying to commit world war three so where’s paris at today remember those uh community service hours that for four years that he had to do so he’s currently serving that with the fbi and he’s been a huge help to

Them from what i could read he’s already done about two years of service with them solving cases that involve his own mirai source code that he released into the wild it would be i make a mess and the fbi sits there and says clean this up and that’s my punishment

And that’s the story of the mirai botnet if you guys have any questions hit me down in the comments thank you so much for watching have a good day