Slashdot Mirror
The Spamming Refrigerator
puddingebola writes "The 'Internet of Things' is as susceptible to malware and spam as the rest of the net. From the article, 'A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets...The spam attack took place between 23 December 2013 and 6 January this year, said Proofpoint in a statement. In total, it said, about 750,000 messages were sent as part of the junk mail campaign. The emails were routed through the compromised gadgets. About 25% of the messages seen by Proofpoint researchers did not pass through laptops, desktops or smartphones, it said.' Read Proofpoint's statement here."
Spam from a refrigerator? That's COLD!
Still think that hooking everything up to the intertubes is a great idea? I can't wait to see what happens with all those home alarms systems that are getting hooked up this way as well.
Om, nomnomnom...
According to Dan Goodin (Arstechnica), who wrote "Is your refrigerator really part of a massive spam-sending botnet?", there are all sorts of problems with Proofpoint's statement. The last paragraph sums it up pretty well:
"Knight said he would check to see if missing evidence—including a malware sample, documentation of a command-and-control server, and samples of the spam and phishing messages—are available for publication. Again, I'm open to the possibility the botnet reported by Proofpoint exists. But until these smoking guns are produced, I'm maintaining a healthy amount of skepticism."
Link: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/is-your-refrigerator-really-part-of-a-massive-spam-sending-botnet/
is what the compromised software really was. I am guessing that these "devices" all used the same opensource embedded WWW server that had a vulnerability.
Probably the biggest issue is that the fridge makers embed this stuff and don't bother to test it for vulnerabilities, assuming that someone else has already done the testing.
While I am a big fan of opensource, blindly using it in a commercial product will lead to all sorts of these types of incidents.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. My TV doesn't have internet access and neither will my refrigerator. They are black boxes transmitting untold things. No thanks.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
The articles are not backed by any facts, and leave out all technical details. Read this article for more info :Arstechnica
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Greaybeards can surely recall the longstanding problem of fridges that sent out spam in our youth. usually the payload was cloaked, sandwiched unknowingly in our lunchboxes between two slices of bread or interleaved undetected in the dinnertime protocols frequent 'casserole' traffic. Even worse, the fridge administrator commonly ignored the issue! it wasnt until we had the option to provision and deploy our own refrigerators that we correctly addressed this problem.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I wish I could go back in time to 2005. I wish I could. I would warn the world about Ruby on Rails. I would warn the world about JavaScript. I would warn the world about the hipsters who come preaching those shitty, shitty "technologies". I would warn the world about the destruction these freaks would bring to our industry.
Would anyone listen? I don't know. Intelligent people probably would. They can inherently sense the stupidity of hipsters, JavaScript and Ruby on Rails, even without seeing them in action. But even if nobody listened, at least I could sleep knowing that I tried my best; that I wasn't complacent.
Hipsters and their web fanaticism has caused so much trouble. Website design is utter shit today (just look at the Slashdot beta website for proof of this). All sorts of devices are now "web-enabled" for no good reason at all, with disturbing consequences. Personal and private data harvesting is at an all-time high. Hipsters killed the GNOME desktop project with their half-assed GNOME 3 release.
I wish I could say that I'm an old man, screaming at the kids to "get off my lawn". But I'm just in my 30s! The computing industry truly has been destroyed so quickly by these hipsters, it's quite unbelievable.
I feel immense shame for not having noticed the hipster plague earlier. I feel self disappointment for not having spoken out sooner. It didn't have to come to this.
I though it would produce edible spam automatically... nothing to read here... move along, move along
The Shape of things to Come!
I remember the good old days working on computers that were the size of a refrigerator. I guess what goes around comes around.
The problem is as long as religions exist that say safe sex is bad and multiplying good? All you are doing is breeding more poverty. I don't know how much hate I've gotten for daring to say we should offer a one time payout of a couple grand for women to get their tubes tied and men to get snipped but the simple fact is if they'd sell their reproductive rights for a quick buck they would be shitty parents anyway and the world is better off.
But as long as you have clergy in third world countries that say things like "condoms give you AIDS" to keep people from using them? Then all you are doing when you feed the starving in the third world is breeding the next gen of beggars sadly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I bet many parts of the fridge were made in the PRC, a country formerly renowned for large numbers of starving and hungry people.
First world hipsters buying IP-enabled fridges have allowed many of those formerly staring Chinese peasants to become part of the world's middle class.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep