It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but at the beginning of 2014, the world’s first ever spam attack involving household appliances hit, when hackers managed to get into consumer gadgets. The attack is believed to have happened between December 23 last year and January 6, and caused affected appliances to annoy massive amounts of people by sending out waves of malicious email in bursts of 100,000 three times per day. Thankfully, each device or gadget only sent around ten emails. About three-quarters of the emails were sent by computers, but the rest were sent out by hacked home appliances.
California-based security group, Proofpoint revealed in January that they’d uncovered a wide-scale hack involving television sets and at least one fridge. Hackers broke into more than 100,000 gadgets that were connected up to the internet, including home-networking routers, televisions, multimedia centres, and of course, that fridge.
The attack, which experts have called the first home appliance ‘botnet’ involved compromising computers, so that while they looked as if they were functioning as normal, in reality they were being controlled by cyber criminals.
The prospect of having your household appliances hacked into by some lowlife criminal with nothing better to do is a really annoying prospect for anyone who uses online controllers to operate anything in the home. As there are now options for so many devices to be connected and controlled by the Internet, have we just opened up a can of worms and given malicious hackers a way to compromise household appliances just as they might a laptop or computer?
The answer to preventing these attacks in the future seems to be improving our online security. It seems that the hackers get into the fridges and appliances easily, because some people can be a little bit lax when it comes to online security with smart devices and controllers. Most of the devices used to send out emails were still set up with the device’s default password, making it really simple for any hacker to get straight in and take control.
David Knight, General Manager of Proofpoint's Information Security division said, “Many of these devices are poorly protected at best and consumers have virtually no way to detect or fix infections when they do occur.”
“These devices are typically not protected by the anti-spam and anti-virus infrastructures available to organisations and individual consumers, nor are they routinely monitored by dedicated IT teams,” said Proofpoint.
If you have remote networks controlling your heating, lighting, entertainment or of course your fridge, change the password, quickly!
