What happened last Friday on the internet might be remembered as the Day of the Zombie Baby Monitors. Tens of millions of electronic devices that are online, such as baby monitors, security webcams and digital video recorders, all of them infected with malware, were given a mysterious order to attack, and they obeyed, sending out mindless waves of traffic.
The target was Dyn, a New Hampshire company that provides domain name services, allowing people to reach the correct website. This is a sort of telephone book of the Internet, but on Friday morning at about 7, the telephone book on the East Coast was paralyzed by junk traffic. Popular websites such as Twitter, Spotify, PayPal and many others suffered outages. Another wave came at noon.
The attack appears to be an unprecedented exploitation of the “Internet of Things,” a term that includes more and more devices that offer user convenience – control your home thermostat from your smartphone – but also are vulnerable to mischief. In general, the benign household devices connected to the Internet are not very sophisticated. Many have factory-wired default passwords that are easy to defeat. This makes them attractive to hackers, who can implant a tiny bot that will awaken them on command. For the full article click here
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