Internet Hot Water

UTS Support Posted on January 15, 2019 Posted in Weekly Tip

The Tip

This issue is just a light-hearted follow-up to the pre-holiday season’s, “Internet Skinny Dipping”. I thought it was ironic to get this article in my news feed upon our return to work.

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The Detail

Apparently amongst the newest entires to the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is a smart-app enabled hot tub. You may ask, “why would I need my hot tub to be smart”. I know I did. The fact is though, whether we need it or not, so many things are becoming net-connected that we need to be aware of the potential pitfalls. Hackers have already launched Denial of Service attacks against major web services using small armies of compromised appliances. Bad security habits can make it easy for a hacker to lock/unlock/start most modern vehicles, or mess with the heating and lighting in your smart-house.

The following story is a tale of how we should never assume that the developers of these technologies are doing even the basic due diligence in the security realm. It actually reads like a lesson in how not to do IoT security. Although it might seem just humorous that some casual neighbourhood hacker might mess with the temperature of your hot tub, it gets a little more scarier and a lot creepier when the tub also sends information to the hacker that the jets are in use, meaning someone is in the tub.

Enjoy the following read, and we’ll get back to regular tips next week.

IoT weaknesses leave hot tub owners in deep water

November Patch Tuesday loads up everyone’s plate November 13, 2024
Fourteen product families affected as 2024 passes an unfortunate milestone
VEEAM exploit seen used again with a new ransomware: “Frag” November 8, 2024
Last month, Sophos X-Ops reported several MDR cases where threat actors exploited a vulnerability in Veeam backup servers. We continue to track the activities of this threat cluster, which recently included deployment of a new ransomware. The vulnerability, CVE-2024-40711, was used as part of a threat activity cluster we named STAC 5881. Attacks leveraged compromised […]
Bengal cat lovers in Australia get psspsspss’d in Google-driven Gootloader campaign November 6, 2024
The Internet is full of cats—and in this case, malware-delivering fake cat websites used for very targeted search engine optimization.
Pacific Rim: Inside the Counter-Offensive—The TTPs Used to Neutralize China-Based Threats October 31, 2024
Sophos X-Ops unveils five-year investigation tracking China-based groups targeting perimeter devices
From the frontlines: Our CISO’s view of Pacific Rim October 31, 2024
On beyond “Detect and Respond” and “Secure by Design”
Pacific Rim: What’s it to you? October 31, 2024
Thirty-five years after the first great cat-and-mouse infosecurity story, here we are again
Pacific Rim: Learning to eat soup with a knife October 31, 2024
What our incident responders know from five years of fighting an octopus
Digital Detritus: The engine of Pacific Rim and a call to the industry for action October 31, 2024
Decades of obsolete and unpatched hardware and software endanger us all
Pacific Rim timeline: Information for defenders from a braid of interlocking attack campaigns October 31, 2024
Sophos X-Ops unveils five-year investigation tracking China-based groups targeting perimeter devices
Sophos Firewall hardening best practices October 25, 2024
Make the most of your Sophos Firewall.

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