Zombie Army Attacks – Are Your Devices Safe?……..

Zombie Army attacks – are your devices safe?….

This week hundreds of thousands of webcams and digital recorders have been infected by a ‘botnet’, aka a ‘zombie army’. This infection was completed in order to overwhelm online services with traffic from multiple sources, consequently crashing the service. Millions of internet addresses were targeted causing major disruption to websites such as Twitter, PayPal, CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Allison Nixon, director of research at the security firm Flashpoint, said its web-enabled CCTV cameras and digital video recorders were forcibly networked together using the sophisticated malware program Mirai. “It’s remarkable that virtually an entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States,” she told security researcher Brian Krebs.

Leading up to the attack cyber experts issued a warning of the creation of increasingly sophisticated botnets. These sophisticated botnets are able to rotate IP addresses (likely to avoid detection) three times more often as other botnets previously.

The attacks and devices used to create these attacks are extending everyday. Household and everyday devices –e.g. cameras and now, even kettles, which have been connected to the internet, (through a concept of ‘connectivity’,) are making the complexity of attacks increasingly challenging.

If these attacks cannot be prevented by the worlds largest cyber security firms and, US Homeland Security are struggling with identifying the source during their investigations, how can businesses and individuals ensure they are cyber safe in this increasingly dangerous, Zombie Army world?