By Maniteja Mallula
In this blog we will look upon growing of DoS attacks in Internet of things.
Since the formation of internet of things, it has pinched many criticisms due to lack of security issues in the design and deployment of hardware and software components. This resulted in various defects which hackers can successfully exploit IoT components that includes performing of denial of service attacks.
What are DoS attacks?
The Internet has grown to a large extent that has become the global tool for communication, where the platform allows information sharing and perform tasks with the help of contributing sources of computing. With this growth there are also increased illegal acts over the users of the internet, one such act is the Denial of service or shortly known as DOS, is one of the most malicious attack.
DoS attack is performed by hackers to disable a network and make unavailable for the users whose services of host connected to Internet. It is typically done by flooding a resource or targeted machine with surplus requests to overload its system and prevent legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
History of DoS attacks:
· panix is the third oldest internet service provider in the world after NetCom and the world. In 1996, panix is the first victim of DoS attack that subjected to SYN flood which damaged its services for several days.
· In 2018, Git hub was hit by an DoS attack of 1.35 terabits per second. In the same year, Arbor network fell victims to largest DDoS attack reaching a crest of about 1.7 terabits per second.
· In 2019, telegram was subjected to DDoS attack to prevent protesters from using it.
IoT DoS attacks:
The mirai malware scans for IoT devices which uses their default password and then ropes them into botnet which can be used to launch IoT DoS attacks. In 2016, it was recorded as biggest DDoS attacks.
This malware primarily targets online consumer devices such as printers, ip cameras and home routers. Its target was the Internet infrastructure services provider Dyn DNS and attack consisted of wave DNS queries from millions of IP addresses. It was made possible through mirai infection of over thousands of IoT devices.
This mirai botnet includes 400,000 bots and the attack bombarded Dyn DNS with up to 1.2 TBps to bogus traffic and making impossible for service to respond to legitimate DNS requests from websites of their customers. As consequence, major online platforms including Amazon, PayPal, Twitter and Netflix were made unavailable to users across the world.
To prevent IoT DoS attacks:
They were several precautions to be taken, to reduce some risk to IoT DoS attacks following procedures need to be done.
- If you own an IoT device, make sure to change their default password.
- Disable any UPnP (universal plug-and-play) settings on connected devices.
- Keep your network routers and IoT devices updated time-to-time for their firmware, software and security patches.