Massive IoT DDoS Attack Causes Widespread Internet Outages. Are Your Devices Secured?
November 1st, 2016
As you probably know already, the United States experienced its largest Internet blackout in history on October 21, 2016 (Opens in new window), when Dyn—a service that handles website domain name routing—got hit with a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack from compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The day will be known forevermore as the day your home IP camera kept you from watching Netflix.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now when it comes to IoT security: We've previously discussed how IoT devices can be used to watch consumers and break into business networks.
This specific outage is an example of how the tech industry is ignoring security mistakes of the past (Opens in new window) and failing to take a proactive approach in protecting IoT networks.
The Outage
The October outage included three separate attacks on the Dyn DNS provider (Opens in new window), making it impossible for users in the eastern half of the U.S. to access sites including Twitter, Spotify, and Wired. This attack was different from typical DDoS attacks, which utilize malware-compromised computers to overwhelm servers with requests to knock them offline. Instead, it used malware call Mirai that took advantage of IoT devices (Opens in new window). These compromised devices then continually requested information from the Dyn servers en masse until the server ran out of power to answer all requests, thus bringing down each site in turn.
This outage did not take down the servers hosting the platforms, but rather the metaphorical doorway necessary to access those sites.
Ongoing Security Concerns
According to ZDNet (Opens in new window), the IoT industry is, at the moment, more concerned with putting devices on the market to beat competition than it is with making devices secure. IoT devices are notably easy to hack (Opens in new window) because of poor port management and weak password protection (Opens in new window). IoT devices are also known for not encrypting communication data (Opens in new window). October's attack wasn't even the first of its kind: A 145,000-device IoT botnet was behind a hospital DDoS attack just one month prior (Opens in new window).
What You Can Do
MacWorld recommends (Opens in new window) changing the default security configuration settings on all IoT devices and running those devices on a secondary network. The Mirai malware works simply by blasting through default username and password credentials (Opens in new window)—so users could have protected themselves by swapping the default "admin/admin" and "password/password" settings. There are also IoT security hub devices (Opens in new window) available to compensate for IoT security shortcomings.
IoT devices can offer fantastic perks for your office, but the security concerns are too important to ignore. If you're interested in improving network security pertaining to IoT devices or looking for advice on which IoT devices would benefit your workplace, don't hesitate to contact ATS today.
Posted in: Cybersecurity, Cloud