“Smart” internet-connected devices such as webcams, kettles and baby monitors are “too dumb” to resist the kind of cyber-attack that brought down some of the world’s most popular websites on Friday, experts have warned. Twitter, Paypal and Spotify were among the sites made inaccessible on Friday after hundreds of thousands of connected devices were exploited to overwhelm the US-based web infrastructure company Dyn with traffic from millions of internet addresses. Attacks using connected devices are not new. In 2014, a fridge, home routers and smart TVs were among 100,000 devices hacked to launch a spam email campaign. Bunz agreed that the general public does not understand how vulnerable connected devices are.

Source: The Guardian October 22, 2016 14:03 UTC