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Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

tomshardware.com

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Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#171

Post by chankstein38 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #39
zzyzxd wrote: post #19

> Though we don’t have the finer details of the DDoS story, it serves as yet another warning for device owners to do their best to keep their devices, firmware, and software updated; monitor their networks for suspicious activity; install and use security software; and follow network security best practices. Maybe they should only allow qualified consumers with required certification to purchase such a smart toothbru…

The call if of course on device owners, and not device manufacturers whose responsibility it truly is to manufacture secure devices.

Maybe the device owner only needs to be certified if the device was manufactured by a company that has had compromises or breaches in the past. That way, their sales take a massive hit if they have a problem. That may motivate these companies to do something about security.

Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#172

Post by mynameisvlad »

cromka wrote: post #142
mynameisvlad wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sensors of the air purifier can be used for spying To be able to... know if your target's house has a lot of pollutants? Is particularly warm? There is practically no useful information that can't be gleamed by just looking through their windows, blinds and all. > and the device could also be used as a hopping point for exploiting other devices in your home. It's not connected to your home network, that's the w…

Just a mere few years ago you wouldn’t believe WiFi access point can be used as a sonar to literally scan the area like a low-def camera in real time. Stuxnet also sounded like a completely made up scenario. As someone said, you lack imagination. And that’s OK, but you’re also being quite arrogant, too.

> There is practically no useful information that can't be gleamed by just looking through their windows, blinds and all.

I have plenty of imagination. I also am practical and realize how illogical the argument of “sensor fusion” is to do something you can just use your eyes for.

Nobody is going to go out of their way to do this when KISS methods already exist and y’all don’t seem to understand practicality if you don’t see that.

Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#175

Post by depereo »

n2d4 wrote: post #155
croon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read dutch, but machine translated to english the "original source" as referenced in your link says this: > The example that comes like a Hollywood scenario has really happened that way.

Here's a better translation: > This example, which seems like a Hollywood scenario, actually happened.

The best translation, however, is from Fortinet's clarifying statement.

https://mastodon.social/@jasonkoebler/111892744775689047

"It appears that due to translations the narrative on this topic has been stretched to the point where hypothetical and actual scenarios are blurred"

Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#177

Post by kwhitefoot »

Gigachad wrote: post #141
kwhitefoot wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much data can a toothbrush collect? Surely just a few hundred bytes per brushing session. The ESP32 has 160 kB of usable RAM out of the 520 kB total capacity. Surely enough for weeks of data even if the data structures are badly designed.

The problem is you can't reliably collect it over bluetooth. I doubt iOS allows apps to just run always active background tasks to fetch data over bluetooth while the app is not open. The user expects the data on the app to always be in sync. If they check it outside of bluetooth range and see days of data is missing, it'll look broken.

> The problem is you can't reliably collect it over bluetooth.

Really? Why not?

Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#178

Post by croon »

greenyoda wrote: post #157
croon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read dutch, but machine translated to english the "original source" as referenced in your link says this: > The example that comes like a Hollywood scenario has really happened that way.

> I can't read dutch, but... It's not Dutch, it's German, so trying to translate it as if it were Dutch would give strange results (although Google Translate tried to do it anyway, and came fairly close, due to the languages being somewhat related). The original sentence: "Das Beispiel, das wie ein Hollywood-Szenario daherkommt, hat sich wirklich so zugetragen." Translating from German, Google Translate gave me: "Thi…

You're right, and I should've realized that, but I just used the browser translation and must've misread deutsch for dutch.

Regardless, the translation is close enough to yours (albeit grammatically awkward).

Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#179

Post by Gigachad »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #177
Gigachad wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you can't reliably collect it over bluetooth. I doubt iOS allows apps to just run always active background tasks to fetch data over bluetooth while the app is not open. The user expects the data on the app to always be in sync. If they check it outside of bluetooth range and see days of data is missing, it'll look broken.

> The problem is you can't reliably collect it over bluetooth. Really? Why not?

Because apps aren't allowed to be persistently running in the background. So you'd have to get the user to actively open the app while using the toothbrush which is annoying. If you let it connect to wifi, it will just work always without any manual user effort.

Re: Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks

#180

Post by dredmorbius »

tauchunfall wrote: post #165
greenyoda wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't read dutch, but... It's not Dutch, it's German, so trying to translate it as if it were Dutch would give strange results (although Google Translate tried to do it anyway, and came fairly close, due to the languages being somewhat related). The original sentence: "Das Beispiel, das wie ein Hollywood-Szenario daherkommt, hat sich wirklich so zugetragen." Translating from German, Google Translate gave me: "Thi…

>It's not Dutch, it's German, so trying to translate it as if it were Dutch would give strange results Anecdote: One of my coworkers once thought that Dutch means German. I guess it was because the words "dutch" and "deutsch" look so similar.

It's possible that terms such as "Pennsylvania Dutch", which refers to the German-Paletine originating Amish and other groups within the US state of Pennsylvania, might account for some of this confusion. The "Dutch" in that case are actually "Deutsch", that is, of German origin.

That said, the Dutch language is among the Germanic languages, and is closely-related to German itself (similarly, the Dutch-derived Afrikaans, with which Dutch is largely mutually intelligible). To someone reasonably fluent in German, Dutch looks like a somewhat garbled variant. Similarly Danish, though the spoken form varies considerably from the orthography, and Norwegian, also closely related. Contemporary German shares many words and a fair bit of grammar with English as well, making blingualism in both relatively easy, compared with, say, more distant languages such as English-Arabic or English-Mandarin.

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