It has been a recent trend that botnets are being used to perform a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
These attacks have targeted devices that have hard-coded passwords, default passwords or no passwords at all.
The malware developers aimed to simultaneously request access to flood a network. This creates the bottleneck and hurts the network performance drastically.
The recent DDoS attacks is considered one of the largest in years. All of this is due to the fact that there was a huge demand for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.
To fully understand what IoT is, here is the basic explanation from Wikipedia.
“The Internet of things (stylized Internet of Things or IoT) is the internetworking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices”), buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.”
Meaning to say, your security cameras, printers, and ip-connected devices are susceptible. The reason being, is due to the sudden rise of demand for such devices. Manufacturers started producing and had set a pre-set configuration including passwords.
Not everybody is tech savvy. If you are one of them, here are a few things you might want checked.
1.) Make sure you change the passwords to access your modems and routers.
2.) Change security setting from WEP to WPA/WPA2.
3.) It is recommended that you disable Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) since there are significant security vulnerabilities.
4.) Even if you don’t own any IoT devices yet, it is a good idea to make these changes now in order to ensure that your home network is secured.
5.) Make sure there are no open ports that attackers can use.
6.) It would be very good idea to reset the devices first to factory defaults to wipe out malicious code that has been placed by the hackers and have the firmware upgraded.
Once you have gone through the checklist, you have done you part in helping prevent DDoS attacks.
