A new security threat: electric toothbrushes under hacker attack
Do you think that an electric toothbrush is a harmless device that is intended only for its usual purpose in your bathroom? A recent hacker attack has shown that breaking into your small home gadget can lead to serious consequences.
Hacking or phishing your email client used to cause fear among users, but by today's standards it is a primitive trick that is not used by high-end hackers. Today, cybercriminals are coming up with more and more sophisticated ways to hack users' digital space and are increasingly attacking smart home devices that would seem to have no value to them. But attacks on these gadgets are especially dangerous because they are usually connected to several of your accounts and mobile devices. They recently discovered a very unusual attack method.
Who would have guessed that the weak point of a smart home would be... an electric toothbrush! Cybersecurity company Fortinet discovered that 3 million of these gadgets had been hacked.
By hacking such a huge number of toothbrushes, cybercriminals were able to obtain a botnet, which they then used to launch a hacker DDoS attack on a website owned by one Swiss company. How did they do it with toothbrushes? The solution was ingenious in its simplicity - millions of toothbrushes operated by criminals sent continuous requests to the site, which led to its immobilization due to overload. As a result of this attack, this page was taken offline for approximately four hours.
However, in this case, each of the owners of hacked toothbrushes faced potential danger. Then the danger was increasing, like a falling house of cards. Once they had access to these devices, it was easy for criminals to hack into other people's toothbrushes and gain access to their sensitive and financial information. Surely you are now concerned about protecting your toothbrush?
Luckily, there are simple steps you can take to keep your home gadgets safe. First of all, make sure that your home Wi-Fi network is reliably protected and use strong encryption technologies such as WPA3 together with firewalls. It is also recommended to create a complex password for your network and change it periodically. A secure barrier will make it difficult for hackers to gain unauthorized access to our equipment. In addition, do not forget to install the latest software updates on your home gadgets, in which their manufacturers take into account the latest threats and eliminate identified vulnerabilities.