01/20/2014
Refrigerators now do more than keep spam, that tasty treat, cold, they also send spam, the electronic email version.
That is the story of a compromised refrigerator that sends cold "spam" to unsuspecting users via it's internet connection.
Viruses makers will try to add anything to their botnets, and the latest attack on "refrigerators" does not surprise me at all. The target of this attack was a refrigerator model running a flavor of Linux that had not been hardened or protected against malware, and was allegedly sending out lots of spam.
There was no proof from Proofpoint of the actual source refrigerator in the article, making some at Ars Technica question the veracity of the story. Either way it is only a question of time before these Internet connected devices start doing more than laundry. With ipv6, which has 3.4 x 1038 addresses (that is 3,400 trillion trillion trillion addresses), which means any item can have an ip address. If there are soon 10 billion people in the world, we could tag more than 100 trillion trillion items each with an ipv6 address, so these won't run out unless we want to start tagging stars in the sky.
Make no mistake about it: The virus makers are targeting any Target (pun intended) that they can, in an attempt to:
- Steal money
- Steal your identity
- Steal your wallet (bitcoin users know this problem very well)
- Steal your data (credit card numbers, for example)
- Hold you for Ransom
If these don't work, they will infect your device and use it to send more spam or malware.
The moral of the story is that in an always-connected world every device is contantly being probed for weaknesses to find an entry point to launch an attack.