Slightly over one year ago, several major distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks took place, including a major event affecting the domain name service provider Dyn, which caused outages and slowness for a number of popular sites, including Amazon, Netflix, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Twitter.

Now, a new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet, called IoT Reaper, or IoTroop, has been discovered by researchers and could present a threat that could dwarf the 2016 attacks and create a major disruption to internet activity around the world.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced on Thursday, December 3, 2015, that it had served its first-ever warrant under Canada’s anti-spam law (CASL, enacted July 2014) to take down a command-and-control server located in Toronto, Ontario, that was being used to distribute Win32/Dorkbot malware.