Weaponry

The main purpose of this malware is to organize DDoS attacks on demand. Several types of attacking techniques are supported, including the following:

• UDP flood
• SYN flood
• ACK flood
• GRE flood
• HTTP flood
• DNS flood
  

Here is the snippet of Mirai's source code mentioning them:

Figure 9: Different attack vectors of Mirai malware

As we can see here, the authors implemented multiple options so that they could select the most efficient attack against a particular victim.