In August 2016 the Mirai Botnet was unleashed, using millions of poorly secured IoT devices to launch a number of DDoS attacks that resulted in relatively minor impact by taking down the website of security analyst Brian Krebs through to clobbering the Dyn network which, in turn, resulted in some of the world's biggest websites dropping off the Internet. The creators of the Mirai software have been charged and have pleaded guilty in a US court.

Last September, a bunch of major websites were rendered 404 when the Mirai botnet surfaced. By attacking hundreds of thousands of unsecured IoT devices Mirai was able to attack DNS provider Dyn resulting in hundreds of online services dropping like flies. Persirai borrows some code from Mirai but "improves" upon it.