The Circle Of Life: A Large-Scale Study of The IoT Malware Lifecycle

Our current defenses against IoT malware may not be adequate to remediate an IoT malware attack similar to the Mirai botnet. This work seeks to investigate this matter by systematically and empirically studying the lifecycle of IoT malware and comparing it with traditional malware that target desktop and mobile platforms. We present a large-scale measurement of more than 166K Linux-based IoT malware samples collected over a year. We compare our results with prior works by systematizing desktop and mobile malware studies into a novel framework and answering key questions about defense readiness. Based on our findings, we deduce that the required technology to defend against IoT malware is available, but we conclude that there are insufficient efforts in place to deal with a large-scale IoT malware infection breakout.