Refrigerators - New weapon or victim of cyber war

1. REFRIGERATORS
New weapon or victim of cyber war
Presented by:
Nataraj Bhargava

2. HAVE YOU HEARD OF NEW WEAPONS OF
CYBER WARS
 100,000 Refrigerators and other home appliances hacked to perform cyber
attack
 After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your
home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war.
 Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint found more than 100,000
Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances
compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails.

3. WHAT IS THIS ?!!
 As the ’Internet of Things’ becoming smart and popular it became an easy
weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks.
 Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but
this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that
are used as 'thingBots'- Thing Robots.
 “The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between
December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious
email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting
Enterprises and individuals worldwide."

4. WHAT IS THIS ?!!
Like your personal computers can be unknowingly compromised
to built a huge botnet network that can be used to launch
cyber attacks, in the similar way your Smart Household
Appliances and other components of the "Internet of Things"
can be transformed into slaves by the cyber criminals.
The worst thing with these smart appliances is that it can be
easily approached by cyber criminals due to its 24 hour
availability on the Internet with an add-on of poorly protected
Internet environment i.e. Poor misconfiguration and the use of
default passwords.

5. WHAT HAPPENED ?!!
 More than 25 percent of the volume was sent by things that were not
conventional laptops, desktop computers or mobile devices; instead, the
emails were sent by everyday consumer gadgets such as compromised
home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and
at least one refrigerator.
 No more than 10 emails were initiated from any single IP address, making
the attack difficult to block based on location -- and in many cases, the
devices had not been subject to a sophisticated compromise; instead,
misconfiguration and the use of default passwords left the devices
completely exposed on public networks, available for takeover and use.

6. WHAT NOW?!!
Now it seems that we have 100's of cyber weapon in our home
or in another way 100's of vulnerable dynamites living with us.
This time it has been just a spam mail attack, but answer me..
How much damage could a group of well-trained hackers do,
economic and otherwise, if they really wanted to?

7. REFERENCES
BE AWARE, STAY SAFE!
 http://investors.proofpoint.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=819799
 http://www.zdnet.com/internet-of-things-8-9-trillion-market-in-2020-212-
billion-connected-things-7000021516/