Israeli hackers show light bulbs can take down the internet

Weizmann Institute researchers use airborne drone to take control of nearby office devices to demonstrate vulnerability of the ‘Internet of Things’

A team of researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science has shown how hackers can use the simplest of household devices, like light bulbs, to potentially take down sections of the internet or launch a full-scale attack on a country’s infrastructure.

The researchers focused on hacking into ordinary devices which are connected to the internet, the so-called “Internet of Things,” to show how easy it is to take control of the devices and employ them for the kind of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took down wide swathes of the internet last month for several hours.

The experiment, carried out by four researchers, Eyal Ronen, Colin O’Flynn, Adi Shamir and Achi-Or Weingarten, focused on simple Philips Hue wifi-connected smart bulbs and showed how the bulbs can “infect each other with a worm that will spread explosively over large areas in a kind of nuclear chain reaction.”

“The attack can start by plugging in a single infected bulb anywhere in the city, and then catastrophically spread everywhere within minutes,” the researchers’ paper said. For the full article click here 

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