An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom’s Hardware: According to a recently published report Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), there have been about three million smart toothbrushes infected by hackers and enslaved to botnets. This massive army of combined teeth cleaning tools was used in a DDoS attack on a Swiss company’s website, the source reports. The firm’s website crashed under the strain of the attack, reportedly costing it millions of euros in lost business. In this particular case, the toothbrush botnet was thought to be vulnerable because of its Java-based operating system. The source report did not mention a specific brand of toothbrush. Normally, toothbrushes would use their own connections to track and improve a user’s oral hygiene habits, but after being infected with malware, these toothbrushes were forced into a botnet.
Stefan Zuger from the Swiss division of global cyber security firm Fortinet gave the publication some tips on what people can do to protect their toothbrushes or other connected devices such as routers, set-top boxes, surveillance cameras, doorbells, baby monitors. , washing machines, etc. “Every device connected to the Internet is a potential target or can be misused for an attack,” Zuger told the Swiss newspaper. The security expert also explained that every connected device is constantly being scanned for vulnerabilities by hackers, so there is a veritable arms race between device firmware/profirmware manufacturers and cybercriminals. Fortinet recently connected an “unprotected” computer to the Internet and found that it only took 20 minutes for it to be exposed to malware.