Ask Arthur

I’ve heard that anything, from washing machines to electric toothbrushes, can be hacked. Is it true? And why would hackers be interested in my smart alarm or my toothbrush?

It’s funny you should ask, as we are currently trying out a cutting edge electric toothbrush. However, one must see the threat in context. Any device connected to the internet – part of what is called the Internet of Things, in which devices exchange information – can be hacked, if there is no security layer built in.

Why would someone hack your fridge or toothbrush? Simple: if they can take control of enough devices, they can use those, in turn, as “botnets” to stage vast cyberattacks on important systems, websites or other targets.

These are known as DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, intended to bring down a website or system by bombarding it with such a high intensity of requests, it cannot cope.

That’s exactly what happened in Switzerland recently, with Aargauer Zeitung newspaper reporting that cybercriminals had infected three million smart toothbrushes with malware to carry out a massive DDoS attack on a Swiss company, taking it offline for several hours and costing millions of euros in damages.

Network security provider Netscout says its threat intelligence team has identified a sudden increase in device activity since the end of last year, signalling “a new weaponisation of the cloud against the global internet, representing the beginning of a threatening new wave of cybercrime”.

However, much of this can be put down to lack of security in such systems, says Christopher Conrad, senior threat intelligence analyst at Netscout.