Mirai botnet that was used in recent massive DDoS attacks against DNS provider Dyn, causing vast internet outage last Friday. Mirai malware contains several vulnerabilities that might be used to destroy botnet’s DDoS capabilities and mitigate future attacks. If exploited, the vulnerability could crash the attack process, thereby terminating the attack from that bot (infected IoT device), but leaving that compromised device intact and running. Hacking back involves making changes to systems across various countries without permission from a device’s owner, an ISP or its carrier.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/mirai-botnet-iot-malware.html