New Rapidly-Spreading Hide and Seek IoT Botnet Identified by Bitdefender

BitDefender researchers identified a rapidly spreading IoT botnet dubbed Hide and Seek (HNS) that uses worm-like IP scanning and Telnet credential attacks to infect devices worldwide (reported ~14,000 devices). HNS implements a custom peer-to-peer architecture, ECC-based command authentication, signed remote configuration updates, and opens random UDP ports for command/control; it can exfiltrate information (potential espionage/extortion) and continuously evolves, though it does not achieve persistence (reboot clears infection).