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Symantec’s Security Response team has discovered that cybercriminals are hijacking home networks and everyday consumer connected devices to help carry out DDoS attacks on more profitable targets, usually large companies.
To succeed, they need cheap bandwidth and get it by stitching together a large web of consumer devices that are easy to infect because they lack sophisticated security. IoT devices are a prime target, since they are designed to be plugged in and forgotten after basic set-up.
“The results of the survey are unsurprising, and something security experts have been talking about for a while. IoT devices are proliferating at an incredible rate, many of them delivered by companies with little experience in hardening devices against attack. As a result, they’re falling victim to simple attacks that rely on very poor security in the device.
It’s like security ground-hog day – we’re going to have re-learn all the lessons of the last decade and apply them to a new class of device, quickly.
If we don’t, we’re going to be presenting hackers with oceanic quantities of free computing resource ready to be used for anything from spam email services to massive DDoS attacks against critical infrastructure,” Geoff Webb, Vice President of Solution Strategy, Micro Focus, told Help Net Security