Kevin Lancaster
MyBroadband Editor
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2014
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- 13,564
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Could your kettle bring down the internet?
How could a webcam help bring down some of the world’s most popular websites? It seems unlikely but that’s what happened recently when hackers attacked the internet infrastructure run by US firm Dyn, knocking out services including Paypal, Twitter and Netflix. More accurately, the attacked involved potentially hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras and digital video recorders connected to the internet that had been weaponised by the hackers.
They were infected with malicious software that turned them into a “botnet”, a network of devices controlled by an outside force. This was then used to flood Dyn’s infrastructure with activity, grinding it to a halt. These so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are a common technique among cybercriminals. But this was only the second recorded time a DDOS attack involved what’s known as Internet of Things devices – devices other than PCs and mobiles that are connected to the internet.
How could a webcam help bring down some of the world’s most popular websites? It seems unlikely but that’s what happened recently when hackers attacked the internet infrastructure run by US firm Dyn, knocking out services including Paypal, Twitter and Netflix. More accurately, the attacked involved potentially hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras and digital video recorders connected to the internet that had been weaponised by the hackers.
They were infected with malicious software that turned them into a “botnet”, a network of devices controlled by an outside force. This was then used to flood Dyn’s infrastructure with activity, grinding it to a halt. These so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are a common technique among cybercriminals. But this was only the second recorded time a DDOS attack involved what’s known as Internet of Things devices – devices other than PCs and mobiles that are connected to the internet.