Hackers tapping home applicances to launch attacks
The devices in people’s homes and offices that are connected to the Internet — things like routers and cameras and rice makers and thermostats — are going to be increasingly taken over by hackers in the coming weeks and used to suppress free speech and commit crime.
Cybersecurity experts have been issuing the warning since last week when a malicious piece of secret software that was used in a major attack was publicly released for anyone to use.
Days earlier, hackers used the Mirai “malware” to identify hundreds of thousands of home and office devices with weak security. The hackers stitched them together into a network that sent out a flood of messages that knocked out KrebsonSecurity, a website run by famed cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs. The release of Mirai “virtually guarantee(s) that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices,” Krebs wrote online. .
