You’ve mentioned these before

Back in #WeekendWisdom number 76, where I talked about connecting devices to the internet and #WeekendWisdom number 84, where I talked about distributed denial-of-service attacks, I mentioned botnets.

What are botnets?

A botnet is a collection of a large amount of compromised devices that are connected to the internet.

How do they get formed?

There are legitimate services out there that scan the entire internet and every device that is connected to it and it keeps a database of all these devices.

Criminals then using these legitimate services are able to tailor their searches and locate:

• CCTV cameras
• Baby monitors
• Digital video recorders
• In-house IP cameras
• Any other type of device that may be connected to the internet in a very insecure manner

If they can detect these through this database, what they can do then is compromises it using maybe:

• Default credentials
• Known compromise
• Weak vulnerabilities

in those devices. Take them over, add them to their botnet and then they have control of these devices. They give them instructions to carry out a distributed denial of service attack.

So that’s how these botnets get formed.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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