A New Era of Internet Attacks Powered by Everyday Devices

A New Era of Internet Attacks Powered by Everyday Devices
This is only going to get worse. "But hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions, of those security cameras and other devices have been infected with a fairly simple program that guessed at their factory-set passwords — often “admin” or “12345” or even, yes, “password” — and, once inside, turned them into an army of simple robots. Each one was commanded, at a coordinated time, to bombard a small company in Manchester, N.H., called Dyn DNS with messages that overloaded its circuits. Few have heard of Dyn, but it essentially acts as one of the internet’s giant switchboards. Bring it to a halt, and the problems spread instantly. It did not take long to reduce Twitter, Reddit and Airbnb — as well as the news feeds of The New York Times — to a crawl. The culprit is unclear, and it may take days or weeks to detect it. In the end, though, the answer probably does not mean much anyway."