BotNet of CCTV Cameras Discovered

When it comes to using computers, a lot of us feel out of depth when warnings and unwanted pop-ups create unexpected situations that can cost us hours in time as we figure out the issues. It would seem someone has found a way of converting your everyday internet connected CCTV camera into something that can cause untold havoc to sites around the world.

Researchers at the security firm Securi came across the network of interconnected cameras while defending a small jewelry shop against a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS). The site was encountering around 35,000 HTTP requests a second, crashing the site and stopping users from being able to access it at all.

Securi attempted to neutralize the incoming requests using a networking addressing and routing system titled Anycast, the problem being is the second it started working again the number of attacks went from 35,000 to 50,000.

The reason they were able to carry out so many attacks? The network they were coming from included CCTV cameras connected to more than 25,500 different IP addresses coming from no less than 105 different countries, an issue that created a rather formidable network.

While this is not the first botnet to enter the world, it is the first one purely built out of CCTV cameras, with users often not aware of the threats that their internet of things devices face on an everyday basis.