100,000 Refrigerators and other home appliances hacked to perform cyber attack

Have you given shed to Zombies in your house? No???? May be you have no idea about it. After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war.

Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint found more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails.

As the ’Internet of Things’ becoming smart and popular it became an easy weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks.

“The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting Enterprises and individuals worldwide."

Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that are used as 'thingBots'- Thing Robots. 

Like your personal computers can be unknowingly compromised to built a huge botnet network that can be used to launch cyber attacks, in the similar way your Smart Household Appliances and other components of the "Internet of Things" can be transformed into slaves by the cyber criminals.

The worst thing with these smart appliances is that it can be easily approached by cyber criminals due to its 24 hour availability on the Internet with an add-on of poorly protected Internet environment i.e. Poor misconfiguration and the use of default passwords.

More than 25 percent of the volume was sent by things that were not conventional laptops, desktop computers or mobile devices; instead, the emails were sent by everyday consumer gadgets such as compromised home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator. No more than 10 emails were initiated from any single IP address, making the attack difficult to block based on location -- and in many cases, the devices had not been subject to a sophisticated compromise; instead, misconfiguration and the use of default passwords left the devices completely exposed on public networks, available for takeover and use.”

Now it seems that we have 100's of cyber weapon in our home or in another way 100's of vulnerable dynamites living with us.