Alleged Mirai botmaster faces the music in Britain

The hacker accused of running the massive Mirai botnet will stand trial in Britain after being extradited from Germany.

Briton Daniel Kaye, 29, known as Popopret and Bestbuy online, will be charged with using the Mirai malware to launch denial of service attacks against the UK's Lloyds and Barclays banks in January this year.

The attacks caused service disruptions for both banks. Kaye is also alleged to have blackmailed the financial institutions, the UK's National Crime Agency said.

Kaye was extradited to the UK from Germany, where he received a sentence suspended for 20 months after pleading guilty to hijacking 900,000 Deutsche Telekom customer routers in 2016.

During his trial in Germany, Kaye admitted to causing massive service disruption for Lonestar MTN in Liberia, for which he is also facing charges. Kaye is alleged to have been paid US$10,000 to launch denial of service attacks against the Liberian telco.

The Mirai malware infected unsecured internet of things devices with high-speed network connections last year, enrolling them into botnets capable of creating very large denial of service attacks.

It was used to attack domain name services provider Dyn, causing widespread internet outages in October that rendered several high-profile sites including the Guardian, BBC, CNN, Twitter and Paypal inaccessible.