October the 21st 2016, not the first but so far the most aggressive of all, this massive attack bombarded some majors websites, sending billions of requests in order to overload them and effectively shutting them down compromised over 500,000 home security cameras. Half of a million it’s nothing considering that there are more than 6 billion of those extremely insecure IoT devices already in our home and every one of them are able to cause irreversible damages.
Alexandre Despallieres and Xin Wei
“We have warned you!” Explained Alexandre Despallieres and Xin Wei, the two co-founders of K3OPS technologies and STICKnCHARGE. Hackers used a very simple method known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) one of the primitive form of hacking using botnet.
They gave some advices based on the precautionary principle: “First of all, everyone should immediately change the factory passwords from their devices; because by default it would be one of the following: ‘00000’, ‘12345’, ‘password’ or ‘admin’. Second, disable any features that are not absolutely necessaries from your IoT devices and switch them off when they’re not being used. We insist on the switch off or unplug because the sleeping mode is an open gate to hackers, also it is a responsible behavior that will also reduce considerably your energy consumption (we are talking about one full month of electricity bill per year and per household). The last but not the least: try to cut as much as you can wireless connection and prefer wired connection.”
They both concluded: “This is not the first intrusion where hackers used the very not secure IoT to penetrate our home, digging into our personal computers and to steal important information. This is barely an appetizer for cybercriminals, the next load is going to be a disaster, in less than 3 years we will need to deal with the main course with, according to every report on IoT, and more than 20 billion of wireless connected devices will be in service. So no matter what we do, unfortunately similar attacks are very likely. We must secure the Internet of Things; we absolutely have to do it now because tomorrow it will be too late to be sorry.”
For Alexandre Despallieres and Xin Wei, the worst is yet to come and as they repeatedly reported: famous brands and factories need to take the blame since they were well aware about the risk but they chose to close their eyes since this market is like printing money for them. K3OPS stated: “A light bulb is made to deliver a source of light and doesn’t require a granted access to your internet in order to be controlled, to make it simple; if you have to plug a gateway, you are at risk! It is time to explain the truth that lies beneath this jungle, too many companies gather as much of your personal information as they can directly via your gateway, the reality is that most of smart home system had serious bugs due to the manipulated payload allowing brands to bypass some expensive protocols and to reduce their cost.”
At K3OPS, security is a priority; they were the first to provide proper home automation system that can be controlled without any gateway, a simple remote and the latest technology. They redefined every object behind the too complicated Internet of Things, in order to deliver pure, simple and elegant elements.
