Viral news story of botnet with 3 million toothbrushes was too good to be true
Journalists reported on hypothetical toothbrush botnet as if it were real.
@arstechnica Honestly I did believe this story because these days even light bulbs are wifi connected.
I totally expect at least single vendor of toothbrushes to create one that does connect to internet instead of Bluetooth and have 0 security.
Also note that these days Bluetooth can use the same PHY as wifi so in *theory* with a big grain of salt, even a Bluetooth device might be hacked to connect to internet via wifi.
Turns out the Internet is just a massively high tech, multi-player game of telephone tag.
@AnonymooseGuy @arstechnica I mean have you ever really studied TCP/IP? :)
Uhm, a bit. Why?
Are you suggesting a relationship between a sane transport implementation to insane application deployments?
2 tin cans and a string have better transport integrity than simple human comprehension.
@AnonymooseGuy @arstechnica I was being facetious about the nature of the internet hence emoji ;)
@AnonymooseGuy in other words, I'm conflating the logical technical and irrational human elements for comedy value.
@krupo
Sorry. We don't do comedy at the packet level. It causes too many retransmissions.
Unless it's UDP, then it's just a dad fart joke lost in the ether wind.
@AnonymooseGuy that's the ticket
@arstechnica You mean created a fake story for views.
@arstechnica I for one welcome our toothbot overlor..... dammit!
"Journalist".
@arstechnica What is it they say? "Too good to check"?
@arstechnica that's funny, but makes sense given they usually don't connect to always-on wifi..
But, I mean, at this point it's not very unlikely either; a lot of IOT stuff has been used in botnets before, and while toothbrushes usually connect to your phone directly using Bluetooth, if we ever get to the point there's a mass of them connected to always-on wifi, you can bet they'll be used in DDoS attacks at some point.
@arstechnica fake news like this belongs on tooth social