"War on the internet" or "Why we can't have nice things"

[Chris Coles]

Re: "War on the internet" or "Why we can't have nice things"

I would not trust putting a Samsung network-enabled refrigerator on the Internet as I suspect that Samsung uses some variant of Linux that has vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited by someone who cares to put forth a bit of effort.

It is my understanding that the connection is via wireless; that all IoT devices are manufactured to be both accessible from any external IP source and at one and the same moment, designed to be able to receive instruction such as changes to their firmware and to transmit back into the external system surrounding them. As such, these DDOS attacks are being carried out without anyone owning the IoT devices having any idea of what is occurring. Here, all Wi-Fi has been turned off. My only connection is via a cable.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: "War on the internet" or "Why we can't have nice things"

It is my understanding that the connection is via wireless; that all IoT devices are manufactured to be both accessible from any external IP source and at one and the same moment, designed to be able to receive instruction such as changes to their firmware and to transmit back into the external system surrounding them. As such, these DDOS attacks are being carried out without anyone owning the IoT devices having any idea of what is occurring. Here, all Wi-Fi has been turned off. My only connection is via a cable.

A wireless just lets someone relatively close to the device probe it, potentially bypassing any firewalls that may exist between the device and the Internet. However, the bigger concern is multitudes of remote black hats--not in the range of the wireless network--taking control of the appliance. Unless a device really needs Internet access, the best thing to do is to not put it on a network.

A lot of the IoT devices are designed to be very inexpensive which pretty much means that they're going to spend as little on hardware as possible. If I remember correctly, Tesla's cars, which are network-enabled, have two partitioned networks: one for the entertainment system and one for the controls. I very seriously doubt an inexpensive IoT device is going to incur the design and hardware cost of multiple networks in it.

[touchring]

Re: "War on the internet" or "Why we can't have nice things"

A wireless just lets someone relatively close to the device probe it, potentially bypassing any firewalls that may exist between the device and the Internet. However, the bigger concern is multitudes of remote black hats--not in the range of the wireless network--taking control of the appliance. Unless a device really needs Internet access, the best thing to do is to not put it on a network.

I think this is the reason why wireless cams are hooked up to the Internet, so you could use your phone app to stream the video it captures. A hacker could intercept the stream by hacking into the device or the "cloud" that stores and streams your video to your phone - this is exactly what the NSA Citizen Z of Z Nation does, hacking into Internet connected CCTVs throughout the US to spy on what people are doing.

The cloud is another security time bomb because it is a blackbox and you don't know how secure the data will be.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: "War on the internet" or "Why we can't have nice things"

Recent substantial DDOS attack after action report by Flashpoint:

https://www.flashpoint-intel.com/act...t-attacks-dyn/