Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Friday, October 7, 2016

The Internet of Shit

Smart devices in your home are being used by hackers for DDoS attacks:
Devices in people’s homes and offices that are connected to the Internet — things such as routers and cameras, rice makers and thermostats — could increasingly be taken over by hackers in the coming weeks and used to commit crimes or even paralyze businesses and government institutions.
If you wouldn't leave your front door open, then why would you leave the cyber-equivalent of your front door open?

(And really, folks, do you really need an internet-enabled crockpot or a coffee-maker?)

7 comments:

D. said...

Internet-enabled rice cookers?

I mean, I can imagine a hacker trying to add it to a botnet, but as a bot, all it can do is "Your rice will be cooked in 49 minutes."

Phil said...

I know we both love old machinery, your "Because It's Friday" posts are always some of my favorites, I believe we can agree that no one needs a coffee pot or a dish washer that is connected to the internet. I personally do not understand why anyone ever thought they did!
Give me an old Maytag heavy duty washing machine, a simple Mr. Coffee to wake my ass up in the morning and if I want to get on the internet there are hundreds of gadgets available to do that already.

Just because you can do something does not mean you should.

Old 1811 said...

I agree. The only thing I have connected to the internet is my computer and my smartphone, and that's scary enough. Luddites, unite!
But when I need a midnight snack, the porn on the fridge (as was in the news this week) can make the trip to the kitchen entertaining as well as nutritious!

Eck! said...

the problem of bot-nets is that what if all of the rice cooker called up to google at the same time and announce their rice is cooked! While the Denki gamas are doing that all of the doors say they are closed back to the same point and all their thermostat friends did that the same with the message current temperature is...

One of the fundamental precepts is there is finite bandwidth and it can be flooded
and the target can only make so many responses per second...

Its dangerous because they can do this and it will disrupt your internet TV and likely far more.

Eck!

Marc said...

There was a post over at BoingBoing where at Home Depot a refrigerator with a screen in the door had been compromised with the pornhub website displayed. Light switches, thermostats, security cameras, door locks, garage door openers, water heaters, electrical outlets, etc are now part of the IoT - along with the aforementioned kitchen appliances. Maybe little processing power individually, but with little or no security, people will wrangle them together and they become legion.

3383 said...

It's getting hard to find non-smart devices; televisions for instance. I have one of the last plasma TVs; I hope it lasts forever.

I do not want to ever be able to remotely control anything in my house, because that means someone else will also be enabled.

BadTux said...

If you want to *really* be scared, go to the original source material for the SD Tribune's reporting, Krebs on Security. He has a ton of stories about the recent IoT hack DDoS attack, including the source code of the software that the hackers used, and a list of the individual kinds of devices that the hackers compromised to do their DDoS attack (most of which are IP video cameras, not rice cookers -- yep, the becoming-ubiquitous IP video cameras that you see hanging out on lamp posts all over were used to attack the Internet!).

Unfortunately my BluRay player won't even work if I have it disconnected from the Internet. Neither will my devices for watching Netflix and Hulu. I do my best to keep everything else off the Internet though, and I am quite firewalled, thank you very much -- I have OpenVPN to get into my network from outside, but you can't get into my network otherwise.