DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
metropolitan.fi
DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
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Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#2Will botnet build of smart kettles and smart ovens burn houses, neighbourhoods and cities?
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#3Will botnet build of smart kettles and smart ovens burn houses, neighbourhoods and cities?
At that point, the makers of such devices should be punished with a lot more than just a recall.
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#4Perhaps, regardless of the convenience factor, we shouldn't hook critical infrastructure to the internet.
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#5Will botnet build of smart kettles and smart ovens burn houses, neighbourhoods and cities?
At that point, the makers of such devices should be punished with a lot more than just a recall.
Why ? It's impossible to create a super secure device. In that case we could punish entire nations for screwing up the securities of airports, nuclear plants or whatever. Cuz you know it's relatively simple to trigger havoc. Fortunately the world is not full of lunatics.
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#6Will botnet build of smart kettles and smart ovens burn houses, neighbourhoods and cities?
If we had large amount of devices like heaters and boilers attached to remote control system it would be probably possible to cause major problems to the electrical network by just turning the devices on and off in synchronised fashion.
And actually this is not so far fetched, since there are already discussions about making these devices smart and remotely controllable so that the utility company could balance the electricity need.
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#7That sounds like either clueless reporting or an attempt at blame shifting.
The heating system of a building is not a typical DDoS target, and it's improbable that somebody living outside of that building had a take against the inhabitants, knew of the right IP(s) for that building, and the effect a DDoS would have.
It's more plausible that the control system was designed so badly that exposing it to the Internet (and the accompanying background noise from port scanners, be it botnets, spammers or IoT malware) caused it to break down.
Then, the operators saw the effect of the misconfiguration and proclaimed it was a DDoS, because you don't get fired for breaking down under a DDoS, as opposed to having miserable IT security in place. This is similar to getting hacked by "the Russians" (or other state-level evildoers) where it is widely accepted that you just can't prevent such incidents.
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#8Perhaps, regardless of the convenience factor, we shouldn't hook critical infrastructure to the internet.
:) [1]
One thing is sure: we won't ever make 100% secure networks. For now, ransomware are few and only on a big scale, but they could indeed become a big problem with IoT. I'm not exactly sure why we need to connect those devices to the internet: sounds like a local network should be enough. And if we want to send usage data to some kind of aggregation service, devices still can issue POST requests to our connected desktop, or be bluetooth connected to our mobiles.
[1] for those who didn't watch it, the battlestar galactica is one of the only human spaceships not destroyed by robots, thanks to the fact its captain always refused to connect the ship on the network
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#9This was almost certainly a case of outgoing DoS, not incoming DDoS. Terrible reporting.
Remote management hardware got infected with Mirai or the like.
Re: DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
#10Will botnet build of smart kettles and smart ovens burn houses, neighbourhoods and cities?
If we had large amount of devices like heaters and boilers attached to remote control system it would be probably possible to cause major problems to the electrical network by just turning the devices on and off in synchronised fashion. And actually this is not so far fetched, since there are already discussions about making these devices smart and remotely controllable so that the utility company could balance the e…
That's related: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/03/no-more-electrici...