A Chinese electronics manufacturer admitted that its products inadvertently contributed to last week’s massive cyberattack that knocked popular Web services offline.
On Friday, a number of major sites—Twitter, Etsy, GitHub, SoundCloud, Spotify, Shopify—experienced outages as the result of a DDoS attack on DNS provider Dyn. One big part of the problem: the Mirai botnet, which scours the Web for poorly protected IoT-connected devices and enlists them to overwhelm a target with online traffic, causing an outage.
“We can confirm, with the help of analysis from Flashpoint and Akamai, that one source of the traffic for the attacks were devices infected by the Mirai botnet. We observed 10s of millions of discrete IP addresses associated with the Mirai botnet that were part of the attack,” Dyn said in a statement.
In this case, a Mirai-based botnet latched onto hacked DVRs and IT cameras made by Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, which used weak factory-default usernames and passwords to safeguard its products.
“Mirai is a huge disaster for the Internet of Things,” the Chinese firm told Computerworld. “[We] have to admit that our products also suffered from hackers’ break-in and illegal use.”
Xiongmai patched its flaws in September 2015, the company told Computerworld. Its devices now ask customers to change the default password upon first use, but products running older versions of the firmware remain vulnerable. As a result, they should update and change the default username and password. Folks can also disconnect the gadget from the Internet altogether.
