While the vast majority of devices compromised by the Mirai malware attack a little over a week ago were netcams and routers, I wrote last week it’s only a matter of time before attacks like these impact connected kitchen devices
As it turns out, The Atlantic decided to make one (kinda).
Of course, the idea of the Internet toaster at this point is a cliche, but the exercise was useful in that it showed just how fast an insecure device could find itself under attack.
How fast? An hour. And according to Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare – a firm specializing in Internet security – the likelihood of an attack is about 100 out of 100.
“Assuming it’s publicly accessible, the chance [of being hacked] is probably 100 percent,” he said. “The IPv4 address space just isn’t that big. You can now run a scan across that entire space in hours, especially if you have a big botnet. The scans for vulnerability are continuous, and if anything, have accelerated over the last couple of years.”
The lesson? Secure your toasters (and just about everything else) when building a connected kitchen product.