Rogue Smart Fridge Helps Spam 0.75 Million Email Accounts

Do you remember the 1986 movie written by Stephen King called Maximum Overdrive?  The premise is basically this: the earth passes through the green tail of a mysterious rogue comet for 8 days thereby making all of earth’s electrical equipment turn on mankind in an effort to destroy their makers!  I reminisce over this as I have discovered that something similar maybe afoot!  Well, not quite.

A mutinously defiant smart fridge has been found out to be one of 100,000 smart devices that have been used by a malicious email cyber attack.  According to a recent blog post by Proofpoint, a security firm, the devices that also included Smart TVs and media players, were part of an automated network used to send 750,000 spam emails between December 23 and January 6.

Hackers have used the networks of compromised computers to power large-scale cyber attacks for a long time now, but this attack appears to be the first time that non-computer devices have been recorded as being used in such a style.

It’s a harsh warning to those promoting the Internet of Things as a concept, when everything in your house that has a microchip to connect to the Internet can also be hacked!

Proofpoint security manager, Dave Knight, wrote in the blog post that the emergence of ‘thingbots’ make bot-nets an even more of an enhanced security concern than ever before.

The security firm added that it was exceptionally easy for the hackers to get access to some of the devices.  In many occurrences they did so simply because the device was not set up correctly or because the device’s password was the default out of the box one, that was unchanged by the user.

So am I being a tad paranoid regarding machines taking over the world?  Maybe, maybe not.  Have you noticed that green haze on the horizon?

[Image via tizenexperts]

SOURCE: http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/smart-fridge-goes-rogue-helps-spam-750-000-email-accounts-1216164