Hackers using routers and printers

A “denial of service” attack is used by criminals to take down websites by flooding them with requests. These often use compromised PC’s, but recently researchers have been seeing attacks coming from other devices.

Researchers at NSFocus and F-Secure have reported seeing routers and Internet connected printers being used in these “DOS” attacks. These devices don’t even need to be hacked in order to participate in the attack – there’s a communication protocol called SSDP that they use that can repeatedly send information to a targeted site.

As more Internet of Things devices come on line, particularly in people's homes, it’s likely that this kind of attack will try to use them as well.

While there are defenses that can be used against these attacks, this particular one will require some infrastructure changes to fix. 

In the mean time, it’s important that you keep your devices patched and up-to-date to keep criminals from hacking them.