Millions of everyday consumer devices, especially knockoffs that you buy online, are being infected by a malware known as residential proxy software. This gives anyone – including hackers – a backdoor into home networks. The Digital Citizens Alliance estimates that there are 20 million of these back doors in the U.S. WSJ’s Jack Gillum test a few of these malware-riddled products to investigate how criminals are tapping into them to carry out cyberattacks and other types of illegal activity around the world. Chapters: 0:00 Dangers of Internet-connected devices 0:32 How these cyberattacks work 2:24 Dangers of residential proxies 4:31 Comcast investigating the threats 5:52 How many devices are infected? 7:08 How the devices are leveraged Think one of your gadgets has been infected? Here’s how to check: https://on.wsj.com/4ec7Vqr News Explainers Some days the high-speed news cycle can bring more questions than answers. WSJ’s news explainers break down the day's biggest stories into bite-size pieces to help you make sense of the news. #Crime #Cybersecurity #WSJ
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The article stopped a little short. What and how can the average person check/monitor for this type of activity?
Must I really throw away my internet-connected toothbrush and toaster?????
Tech enthusiast: I want IOT everything, I want everything I own to be connected for my automation. People who work IT: I want only the necessary IOT but it's gotta be on a separate vlan with specific rules to limit traffic and to use a specific DNS server.
Don't buy an internet connected toilet.
To the extent that it’s feasible, quit buying things that require an app and internet connection.
I guess Person of Interest finally stopped being sci-fi.
My LG TV started doing this after my son started playing free games on it. The game installed an app called Bright Data that used the TV as a proxy, hundreds of GBs of data a day going through it. LG support had no idea what this was and even denied it was possible.
This is honestly terrifying. I never thought a cheap picture frame could basically turn my home Wi-Fi into a crime tool.
Seriously, this should be illegal. period.
Who would've thought cheap no name streaming superboxes could be used for malicious purposes?
Everyone looks at me like I'm crazy when I use the term faraday cage.
It’s not all that hard to stop. Put all the IOT devices on their own VLAN, and block all outbound traffic (on that VLAN).
You say more than once that there are legitimate uses, but it’s hard to imagine any legitimate use that justifies compromising the security of our homes and businesses in this way.
If someone overseas can exploit those backdoos, be sure someone or some "institutions" in the country will do as well.
You didn’t answer a simple question most of the people watching had… what can you do about it? How can you test for it?
They obviously need to start charging the manufactures and companies including Amazon who sell them.
my smart device has several pictures of backdoors
I've worked for clients that did IoT, it confirmed I will never, ever have IoT in my house. The S in IoT is for security
Think one of your gadgets has been infected? Here’s how to check: /4ec7Vqr
Makes clear that we really NEED consumer routers that are capable of Vlans to at least put those devices in a separate net.