At work, I get a chunk of the DHS “Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report” that’s distributed to our campus it discussion list. (usually the Critical Manufacturing Sector and Information Technology Sector stuff)

https://www.dhs.gov/publication/daily-open-source-infrastructure-report

This came up in today’s excerpt:

7. June 28, Help Net Security – (International) 25,000-strong CCTV botnet used for
crippling DDoS attacks. Sucuri researchers discovered that a closed circuit television
(CCTV) botnet comprised of 25,000 cameras worldwide was carrying out distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a jewelry store Web site and found that the
compromised cameras were able to emulate normal behavior of popular browsers in
order to make the botnet more difficult to identify and block. Researchers reported that
the attackers could have hacked the devices via a recently disclosed remote code
execution (RCE) vulnerability in CCTV-Digital Video Recorders (DVRs).
Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/06/28/25000-strong-cctv-botnet/

The Internet Of Totally Insecure Things is what’s gonna kill us, not Skynet :-)

Note, if each of those 25K cameras can be used to do DDOS, simply watching them is a piece of cake…

Wonder how a TL15 society manages the endless Hacker vs Hacker war….this is a gargantuan gap in the Traveller Canon, since it pretty much all predates the internet...

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs