- Reaction score
- 1,697
What's next, malware-infected dental floss? But seriously: It's a reminder that even the smallest smart home devices can be a threat. Here's how to protect yourself.
It sounds more like science fiction than reality, but Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung reports that approximately three million smart toothbrushes were hijacked by hackers to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These innocuous bathroom gadgets -- transformed into soldiers in a botnet army -- knocked out a Swiss company for several hours, costing millions of euros in damages.
No, we're not kidding.
While the details are scarce, we know that the compromised toothbrushes were running Java, a popular language for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Once infected, a global network of malicious toothbrushes launched their successful attack.
The repurposed toothbrushes accomplished this by flooding the Swiss website with bogus traffic, effectively knocking services offline and causing widespread disruption.
www.zdnet.com
It sounds more like science fiction than reality, but Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung reports that approximately three million smart toothbrushes were hijacked by hackers to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These innocuous bathroom gadgets -- transformed into soldiers in a botnet army -- knocked out a Swiss company for several hours, costing millions of euros in damages.
No, we're not kidding.
While the details are scarce, we know that the compromised toothbrushes were running Java, a popular language for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Once infected, a global network of malicious toothbrushes launched their successful attack.
The repurposed toothbrushes accomplished this by flooding the Swiss website with bogus traffic, effectively knocking services offline and causing widespread disruption.
3 million smart toothbrushes were just used in a DDoS attack. Really
What's next, malware-infected dental floss? But seriously: It's a reminder that even the smallest smart home devices can be a threat. Here's how to protect yourself.
www.zdnet.com
