Your Baby Monitor Can Be Hijacked Into a Criminal Network
Thousands of infected cameras and monitors, acting together, can send spam, plant malware, or knock websites offline.
Reuters World News · Self-replicating AI warning, Katie Zacharia and F1's Africa returnYour baby monitor could become part of a criminal network without ever leaving the nursery.
The monitor belongs to a category called Internet of Things devices, meaning ordinary household objects that connect to the internet. That group also includes home security cameras and other devices kept in a yard or attached to a house.
A botnet "is a network of infected devices," says Raphael Satter, a Reuters cybersecurity correspondent, describing it as sometimes computers, and sometimes Internet of Things devices like a baby monitor or a security camera, all stitched together.
The strength is in numbers. A botnet is many small devices acting as one, with all of the infected machines following the same instructions.
Together they can be made to do malicious things. They can send spam, meaning large volumes of unwanted messages, plant malware, meaning harmful software placed on other systems, or "carry out distributed denial of service attacks," as Satter puts it, in which so many requests hit a website or online service at once that it is overwhelmed and stops working for real users.
Questions people ask
What is a distributed denial of service attack in plain terms?
It is an attempt to make a website or online service unavailable by flooding it with fake traffic. The infected devices in a botnet all contact the target at the same time, and the flood of requests overwhelms it. Real users then cannot get through, and the site slows down or crashes.
How can I make my home devices harder to hijack?
Change any default password to a long, unique one, and turn on automatic software updates when they are offered. Connect smart gadgets to a separate guest Wi-Fi network if your router allows it, so an infected camera cannot easily reach your laptop or phone. Retire devices that no longer receive security updates.