The Internet is a huge power. It allows us to stay connected to the world’s information. It brings many benefits to us. Today our working day can not be imagined without the internet. We can visit many places by staying at home. We can communicate with different people all over the world. If you enjoy gambling you can test your luck at 22Bet casino Uganda and there is no need to go to Las Vegas or Macau. We use many devices at home that are connected to the internet. And sometimes these devices can be hacked.
Finance And Elections
From the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, there were many hack attacks on different devices in Russia. DDoS attacks were carried out on the largest banks. though, the system worked well and managed to block them, not all of them of course. Hackers did not use the computers but a botnet of 24,000 hacked loT devices. It is believed that it was done because of the belief the hacked elections in the USA.
Home Devices
Usually, the program scans the servers and seeks devices that are connected to the internet by IP addresses. Those can be any devices from cameras to thermostats. As soon as they are found the system is trying to get the right password for them. As most of us do not change the factory password and settings the system pretty easily finds the right one. When the right password is found, it installs the software on it and connects it to the botnet.
The Most Powerful Cyber Attack
The largest attacks are associated with one story. In September, Brian Krebs, a security specialist and former journalist for The Washington Post, exposed the owners of the service in vDOS DDoS attacks. His source hacked into the site and extracted the database and configuration files. After digging into the stolen data, Krebs discovered the alleged vDOS owners. Customers’ questions were answered by: citizens of Israel under the nicknames P1st a.k.a. P1st0 and AppleJ4ck. In two years, they earned about $600,000 from DDoS attacks. On the same day, Israeli police arrested two 18-year-old boys. They were later released in Bali.
Krebs was avenged for the exposure. On the evening of September 20, a powerful DDoS attack began on the site where he published his investigation. 620–665 gigabits of traffic were received per second. For comparison: in 2013, the most powerful was called an attack at 300 gigabits per second. In 2014 was at 400 gigabits, and in 2016 was at 602 gigabits. The most interesting thing is that the requests did not come from computers, but from routers, cameras, and video recorders. How many devices were involved in the attack? It is unknown.
The Krebs blog story described above was just the beginning. A week after the attack, HackForums posted the source code for the Mirai software. It infects devices connected to the Internet, creates a botnet from them, and uses it for DDoS attacks. Just a month after the most powerful DDoS attack, Mirai was talked about again. On the morning of October 21, hundreds of thousands of routers and home cameras began sending requests to the servers of Dyn, which optimizes the infrastructure of hundreds of major services. The company has faced DDoS attacks before and was able to resist them, but the Mirai attack failed to repulse the sites Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, PayPal, Amazon, Box, GitHub, Heroku, Airbnb, Yelp, Reddit, The New York Times, Wired, Mashable, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Vox Media in the US were down all day. The organizers of the attack, who used both Mirai and other botnets, did not get in touch and did not demand a ransom. There are others, but not so large-scale cases of hacking.
ZigBee Story
A home device can be hacked not only by brute force passwords. Employees of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Dalhousie University managed to control Philips Hue light bulbs in an office building via a drone. They exploited a vulnerability in the software update system, managed to infect one light bulb, and then, through a vulnerability in the ZigBee wireless communication protocol, spread the virus to neighboring lamps. To remotely turn on and off light bulbs, a drone and several hundred dollars worth of equipment were enough.
How To Protect Yourself?
The easiest thing is to change the password. Do it every time you buy new devices that are connected to the internet. Install the WPA2 on your router if you don’t have it. On new routers, this option can be found in settings. On the old version, it might not be found there. Some devices might have access via SSh or Telnet protocol interfaces. You should change passwords there as well. In case you have a smart house where there are many different devices. The wise choice will be to buy another router for them so they would not be hacked or at least linked to your PC.