Good news! California just passed a law requiring all Internet-of-things (IoT) devices to have unique, secure password. According to Broadband Genie’s survey of UK and US consumers, 51% of respondents hadn’t taken any kind of security precaution for their IoT knick-knacks. However, with simple username-password combinations (think: admin/admin), wireless routers, internet-connected cameras, and even the unsuspecting microwave can serve as vectors for attacks.
The infamous Mirai botnet—created first as a Minecraft money-making scheme – inflected and then controlled over 600,000 insecure devices to overwhelm service providers, knocking sites like Krebs on Security, Netflix, and Twitter offline. While not a sophisticated attack, the Mirai code could become an “internet-destabilizing super-botnet” because so many devices maintained the same factory-setting password combinations.
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