The toasters that brought down the internet

As strange as it sounds, back in 2016 several major sites (Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and Reddit; to name but a few) were attacked by an army of internet-enabled home appliances, vending machines and adult toys. This series of attacks were of the scale that dwarfed the backbone connections of some entire countries. They made network engineers at ISPs and datacentres around the world weep with frustration, because there was little that they could do but watch as they saw their networks get swamped with malicious traffic from all over the world. These attacks were so successful because of the scale of the distribution and sheer number of IoT devices infected by the malware. It was unlike anything that had been seen before .

While this trend of using SoCs and out-of-date kernels for the majority of IoT devices continues, the Internet of Things becomes more of a weapon of internet warfare than a household convenience. Because of the massive distribution of IoT devices, and the relative insecurity of them, they will continue to be perfect for building massive DDoS botnets that are almost impossible for ISPs to filter out, without spending half a million pounds on an AI-powered Deep Packet Inspection-based filter solution that is.