Do you know how these days everything can be connected to the Internet virtually? And do you know how these tech firms don’t give any crap about the security? As the latest cyber attack “Internet of Things” have shown us, the appliances are created to turn against us. As per the security agency Proofpoint, several apparent smart appliances had been compromised and they were called one of the earliest organized Internet of Things cyber attacks. The appliances used in this type of attack are the wireless speaker systems, smart TVs, home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers and the refrigerators as well.
The hackers had used these appliances in order to send malicious emails to the other smart-appliances with the aim of growing the size of the botnet, an army of the infected devices. Throughout this attack, where the appliances were turned into the thingbots, over 750000 spam and phishing emails were generated from over 10000 daily used consumer gadgets. The hackers used these botnets to conduct the large scale attacks like denial of the service attacks against any particular website by inundating those with traffic. Those attacks were conducted between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014. Let’s talk about a prospective great issue-mainly believing that an increasing number of tech companies are developing the smart appliances ranging from the smoke detectors to the smart thermostats. Similarly. The hackers are also showing that the cars can have the computers compromised, leading to bogus displays to read out as well as even be driven by the Nintendo controllers.
So, it is the high time when the developers should wake up and start considering the security directly from the ground-up.
According to David Knight, the general manager of the information security division of Proofpoint, the botnets were a great security concern and with the emergence of the thingbots, the situation can worsen. He also included that the majority of the devices was protected poorly and the buyers virtually had no way to detect as well as to fix the infections while they occurred. The companies might have found the limits of the distributed attacks were increasing as more of these appliances can be purchased online so the attackers find some additional methods to exploit the buyers.
