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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the rein-in-the-bots dept.

Home webcams that were hijacked to help knock popular websites offline last week are being recalled in the US.

Chinese electronics firm Hangzhou Xiongmai issued the recall soon after its cameras were identified as aiding the massive web attacks.

They made access to popular websites, such as Reddit, Twitter, Spotify and many other sites, intermittent.

Security experts said easy-to-guess default passwords, used on Xiongmai webcams, aided the hijacking.

The web attack enrolled thousands of devices that make up the internet of things - smart devices used to oversee homes and which can be controlled remotely.

Will we go through this over and over with toasters, refrigerators, and every other connected appliance?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:49PM (#418735)

    Get a decent router, completely block internet access off to these devices. If you need to access them remotely, perhaps VPN in to your local network or access it through a remote connection to a secure computer on your network.

    You really can't trust these things to be secure, because your average consumer know nothing about security and they care more that it is easy to use, very few manufacturers are going to care about security especially when the security impacts easy of use.

    Something like a home webcam you can build yourself using a Raspberry Pi. It is certain to be more effort than an off-the-shelf solution, but easier to secure, and you'll always be able to update the software that runs on it.