The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: iot devices

How many Internet-connected devices do you have in your home? I am surrounded by around 25 such devices. It's not just your PC, smartphone, and tablet that are connected to the Internet. Today our homes are filled with tiny computers embedded in everything from security cameras, TVs and refrigerators to thermostat and door locks. However, when it comes to security, people generally ignore to protect all these connected devices and focus on securing their PCs and smartphones with a good antivirus software or a firewall application. What if any of these connected devices, that are poorly configured or insecure by design, get hacked? It would give hackers unauthorized access to your whole network allowing them to compromise other devices connected to the same network, spy on your activities and steal sensitive information by using various sophisticated hacks. There have already been numerous cases of attackers hacking home appliances, industrial control, automotive, medic

Are your internet-connected devices spying on you? Perhaps. We already know that the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are so badly insecure that hackers are adding them to their botnet network for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against target services. But, these connected devices are not just limited to conduct DDoS attacks ; they have far more potential to harm you. New research [ PDF ] published by the content delivery network provider Akamai Technologies shows how unknown threat actors are using a 12-year-old vulnerability in OpenSSH to secretly gain control of millions of connected devices. The hackers then turn, what researchers call, these " Internet of Unpatchable Things " into proxies for malicious traffic to attack internet-based targets and 'internet-facing' services, along with the internal networks that host them. Unlike recent attacks via Mirai botnet , the new targeted attack, dubbed SSHowDowN Proxy , specifically ma