What Is A Botnet? And What Does It Have To Do With Protecting “Smart Home” Devices?

Connectivity is spreading to all sorts of appliances, including toasters. And have been for a while, to the point that there are now billions of IoT devices in use throughout the world, many of which are smart home gadgets. 

Businesses rely on IoT gadgets for shipment tracking and other supply chain monitoring purposes. They help cities control traffic and track energy use. We utilise them to do things like listen to music through smart speakers, check who's at the door with smart doorbells and place grocery orders through the LCD screens on our smart refrigerators.

There is a market worth more than billions a year for smart home technology. But it's important to remember that the market is still in its infancy. And that raises a number of safety concerns.

Dangerous botnet attacks and the Internet of Things

To begin, many of these gadgets still lack advanced security protections, making them ideal targets for fraudsters. A smart lightbulb on a table lamp in your living room probably doesn't seem like an obvious target for hackers. The security of a network is only as good as its weakest link. If a hacker compromises a smart lightbulb, they may get access to the whole home network, including all the devices and data on it.

For still another reason, these gadgets make tempting targets. They are readily recruited into botnets, which are networks of compromised computers and other devices used to intensify Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults by coordinating a large number of compromised machines into a single attacking host that may overwhelm a target with so much traffic that it is rendered inoperable. Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) have the potential to take entire sections of the internet down, interrupt service, and even stifle traffic.

Insecure Internet of Things and smart home gadgets can lead to botnet assaults

What methods do hackers use to compromise these gadgets? The problem, like with many first-generation Internet of Things gadgets, is that many manufacturers use insecure default passwords. Everything from "admin123" to "productname" is among these passwords. Because it's so prevalent, it's easy for hackers to find the specific model of target device by searching a database of exploits.

Some manufacturers of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home devices intentionally embed attack vectors into their products' design, protocols, and coding. When you think about how some of the vulnerabilities were discovered in things like smart door locks, it's even more alarming.

A major issue is the simplicity with which IoT devices may be hacked. However, the answer begins with producers who design secure IoT products. All of the components in these gadgets will have to be shipped with the capacity to download security patches and include robust security measures right from the start.