Hijack of Nearly 1.5m Surveillance Cameras a Wake-Up Call for Security Industry

The security industry received a wake-up call recently.

Nearly 1.5 million surveillance cameras were hijacked. The hackers harnessed two botnets (networks of devices infected with malware).

Key Takeaways:

• Last week hackers managed to bring down a popular security website after hijacking more than a million and a half security cameras.
• KrebsOnSecurity.com, which is owned by freelance journalist Brian Krebs, was flooded with traffic over the course of two days.
• The hackers harnessed two ‘botnets’ – networks of devices infected with malware – comprising 980,000 and then another 500,000 ‘zombie’ devices.

“Mostly using direct traffic, this was an unusual DDoS attack. Rather than tricking faulty servers into boosting malicious traffic, as previous DDoS attacks have tended to do, this ‘amplification’ or ‘reflection’ attack compelled the servers to generate multiple response packets for each packet sent.”

To view the full article, click on the following link:
http://www.ifsecglobal.com/hijack-surveillance-cameras-wake-up-call-security-industry/