A Fast-Evolving New Botnet Could Take Gadgets in Your Home to the Dark Side

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Satori is built to turn routers, thermostats, and other household devices into zombies.

There’s a new botnet in town. Since December, security researchers have been tracking an insidious piece of malware called Satori, which hijacks internet-connected devices and turns them into “zombies” that can be remotely controlled in unison. The number of devices in its thrall is still small. But whoever’s behind it is working quickly to tweak its design, hoping to build a powerful army of machines that can be summoned to pump out masses of e-mail spam, incapacitate corporate websites, or even bring down large chunks of the internet itself.

Satori, whose name means “enlightenment” in Japanese, has dark origins. Some of its source code appears to be the same as that of Mirai, a botnet that in 2016 used hundreds of thousands of compromised routers, web-connected cameras, and other devices…

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