Brickerbot: an innovative and frightening threat, targeting IoTs devices

Have you educated yourself about PDoS attacks? The full term of this cyber-threat is a Permanent Denial of Service attack which is a not a popular topic to discuss. This style of attacking computers is a breath of fresh air, but that is not necessarily a good thing. You might think that affects from Denial of Service attacks are severe, but a permanent one will aim to reach the highest heights. This invasion of hackers can not only disrupt the regular operations of your computer system, but completely ruin your hard drive to the point of you have to reestablish it. This means that victims will have no choice put to spend money on fixing the inflicted damage.

Researchers from Radware accounced that BrickerBot has been detected. This is not your usual and ordinary malware: it attempts to initiate PDoS attacks. Invasions that took place had one specific goal: to affect IoT mechanisms and taint their activity, databases. There appears to be exactly two versions of BrickerBot and they both are interesting variants, exploiting the possibility of affecting systems in rather recently-discovered methods.

Connecting all sorts of devices to the Internet has become a very convenient feature to explore. However, the track record of these connected devices hasn’t been the best: hackers are constantly exploring new methods. BrickerBot also starts its activity to taint elements, connected to the Internet. For example, if your smart TV is linked to the Internet, it is possible that hackers will be allowed to hijack that device. Brickerbot desperately tries to find vulnerabilities in IoT devices and invade them. While other similar threats have tried to conclude DDoS attacks, this specific bot aims to cause financial expenses to the user and disrupt their hard drives. After that, only a professional IT specialist can help.

BrickerBot has already initiated attacks all over the world: from Russia to United States of America, also aiming at users from Africa. PDoS invasions are very detrimental and if you won’t protect your devices appropriately, it is possible that you will become a victim of hackers’ vicious activity. Mirar is a previous threat that is quite similar to BrickerBot, but Mirar does not aim to cause permanent damage.

How can you protect the IoT devices that you exploit from attacks?

There are a couple of tricks that could help users protect mechanisms that are connected to the Internet. First of all, it would be recommended to turn off Telnet access in a device: BrickerBot expects that users will leave this on. A related advise would be to secure Telnet default credentials. Furthermore, default factory credentials of mechanisms should also be modified. This could help avoid BrickerBot and similar attacks from occurring.

Source: radware.com.

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