How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet

In 2016, the Mirai botnet, composed primarily of unsecured internet-of-things devices, was used to conduct sweeping distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The attacks hit, among others, French provider OVH, security reporter Brian Krebs’s website, and Dyn’s internet infrastructure. According to the source text, three young Americans—Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman—pleaded guilty to creating and launching Mirai; the original goal was to gain an advantage over competing Minecraft servers.