The concept of “Internet of Things” promises additional benefits to users. For example, in the case of failure connected to the Internet can send notifications fridge owner or customer service. However, new problems arise.
Most of these “smart” devices that are connected to the Internet, have no protection against malicious software. Naturally, this situation can not but rejoice intruders. As a result, refrigerators, washing machines, counters used energy and other “smart” devices may pose a threat. As the company Proofpoint, dealing with issues of information security has been identified botnet consisting, inter alia, of “smart” electronics.
So, the attackers carried out remote attacks on a variety of devices and combined them into a botnet that sends spam. Its activities are carried out in the time interval from 23 December 2013 to 6 January 2014. For all the time botnet was sent more than 750 thousand emails. In this dispatch was carried out three times a day from the same IP address of the sending of not more than 10 letters. The maximum number of messages sent at one time was 100 thousand more than 25% of the messages were sent from devices that are not traditional computers or mobile devices. In general, in the botnet were over 100 thousand devices, including routers, multimedia centers, television and at least one refrigerator.
As noted in the Proofpoint, most devices have become victims as a result of malicious misconfiguration or because of using default passwords.
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