Privacy and the Internet of Things

Dyn Inc, map of DDoS attack on 10/21/2016 

For those people who still don't think that going to the trouble of creating a unique and above all secure password for all online accounts and electronic devices is necessary, here is a little food for thought.  

Last week, Dynamic Network Services Inc., (Dyn Inc) a computer services company based in New Hampshire which provides online infrastructure support to amongst others: Amazon.com, Etsy.com and Twitter.com was the subject of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This resulted in legitimate visitors to those popular websites being effectively denied access in certain parts of the country.

The attack was launched using an open-source piece of malware called Mirai which scans the Internet for routers, cameras, digital video recorders and other home devices which are unfortunately are all too often only protected by the manufacturer's installed default password.     
Once the malware has infected a device, it can be used to flood a targeted website with spurious traffic which along with tens of millions of similarly infected devices, can literally shut a website server down due to the massive overload of illegitimate visitors. 

To put it in simple terms, your computer, fridge or home alarm system could potentially be hijacked by criminals and used to inflict a botnet attack on a business, government agency or any other entity or group.

While it is unclear what the legal ramifications are (if any) if you allow one of your electronic devices (or appliances) to be hijacked and used in a DDoS attack, surely going to the trouble of changing the default factory password when you install or set-up the device has got to be the way to go.