According to Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung, a company was knocked offline by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack unleashed by a botnet of three million smart toothbrushes. As William Gibson famously said, “The street finds its own uses for things.”
Details are vague but warnings around the cybersecurity (or lack thereof) of Internet of Things devices have abounded for more than a decade. Apparently the toothbrushes, running Java, were infected with malware. Hackers then used the devices to create a vast network of WiFi-connected computers that overwhelmed the target company’s Website with requests.
“Every device that is connected to the Internet is a potential target – or can be misused for an attack,” says system engineer director Stefan Zuger of cybersecurity company Fortinet.
