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Mirai IoT Botnet Co-Authors Plead Guilty (krebsonsecurity.com)
Three hackers responsible for creating the massive Mirai botnet that knocked large swathes of the internet offline last year have pleaded guilty. Brian Krebs reports: The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday unsealed the guilty pleas of two men (Editor's note: three men) first identified in January 2017 by KrebsOnSecurity as the likely co-authors of Mirai, a malware strain that remotely enslaves so-called "Internet of Things" devices such as security cameras, routers, and digital video recorders for use in large scale attacks designed to knock Web sites and entire networks offline (including multiple major attacks against this site). Entering guilty pleas for their roles in developing and using Mirai are 21-year-old Paras Jha from Fanwood, N.J. and Josiah White, 20, from Washington, Pennsylvania. Jha and White were co-founders of Protraf Solutions LLC, a company that specialized in mitigating large-scale DDoS attacks. Like firemen getting paid to put out the fires they started, Jha and White would target organizations with DDoS attacks and then either extort them for money to call off the attacks, or try to sell those companies services they claimed could uniquely help fend off the attacks. Editor's note: The story was updated to note that three men have pleaded guilty. -- not two as described in some reports.
100% his fault for hacking. No excuses.
You leave your car unlocked and with the keys in the ignition... you're stupid for taking a risk like that, but if it's stolen the car thieve still needs to be skinned alive and hung outside the city limits as a warning to other thieves.
Having said that... I think there's nothing wrong with a tablet-like system on a fridge door. It's a convenient place in a kitchen. I just don't think the fridge should be doing anything other than providing an appropriate mount point and power.