A new massive cyber attack showed why you need to change your default passwords

Here is an instructive story about why you should always change your passwords by default on any electronic device connected to the so-called Internet of things.

News site Krebs On Security was subjected to cyber attack

It turns out that as a result of a massive cyber attack on the KrebsOnSecurity.com news site, hackers gained access to more than 1 million devices with passwords by default. This is considered the largest cyberattack DDoS ever recorded. Unknown hackers used separate botnets of networks, which in total consisted of about 1.5 million hacked devices.

DDoS cyber attack (distributed denial of service) is a way to hack a website or online service offline, filling them with traffic from several, usually hacked, devices. In the case of Krebs On Security, the attack that occurred last month was able to fill the site with at least 620 gigabytes of traffic per second.

How to access the devices

Representatives of Krebs On Security explain that the attack was spread through a botnet that accessed hundreds of thousands of devices connected to the Internet of Things, i.e. routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders that are exposed to the Internet and protected by weak or hard Encoded passwords.

Devices with standard or simple passwords are available. The most common and obvious ones were passwords such as "password", "administrator", "default", "123456", "54321", "11111", according to the affected news website.

The moral of the story: you can never be sure that any device connected to the Internet is protected. As representatives of KrebsOnSecurity have added, the more devices we connect to a massive Internet network, the more common these types of cyber attacks will become.