“Cyberattacks on the rise”

By Scott Hamilton

I was enjoying a nice vacation in the Eastern Caribbean when I came across a very troubling article that I feel is necessary to share with you as my readers. We are unfortunately reaching a point in computing technology that we are no longer simply trying to protect our personal information from human hackers, but now we also need to worry about access by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Over the last couple of months, we experienced one of the largest denial-of-service attacks in the last decade.

A hacker group that actually partners with global internet providers (as it turns out they supply networking services to large organizations like Google, Amazon and Microsoft) was caught in not exactly a new kind of attack, but it was an attack for a new reason. The group employed a group of AI bots which were running on millions of home devices, where we would least expect a problem. Between November 19 and 22, the attackers used bots on two million or more Android-based TVs sitting in homes across 22 countries.

The bot was able to launch an attack involving 1.7 billion client applications in just three days, spreading chaos across the internet. The bot’s control servers briefly became the number one visited website in the world, even outranking Google’s advertising servers, which display ads at a global level across nearly every website in existence. Experts following the attack now believe the hacking group Kimwolf was behind the record breaking 29.7 Terabit per second (Tbps) attack, as this attack set a new record of 30 Tbps.

So let’s put this into perspective a little bit; a standard HD movie stream requires only a one megabit per second transfer rate to work effectively, which means this attack took the place of 30,000,000 users streaming a movie in HD, which is close to the normal load on Netflix. Imagine, if you will, that you run a restaurant and you normally sell 100 hamburgers an hour, and suddenly you get a rush order to 3,000 hamburgers needed in an hour. This is basically what happened to NetFlix on November 19 to the 22; they were expected to increase their capacity by over 3,000 times. Needless to say there was an outage on Netflix during that three day period.

This raised a big question. Why, besides to inconvenience Netflix and its customers; what benefit came back to the hacking group? As things were traced, it was found that they were getting a cut in the internet services bill for Netflix network services. This big denial-of-service attack racked up an $85,000 internet bill for Netflix over the three-day period. It is not yet confirmed that this is the case, but it is highly suspect, since the backdoor used to install the bot on TVs around the globe came from a bunch of popular, low cost Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications used primarily to bypass region codes, allowing people to view shows and content that are regionally blocked on streaming services.

These VPN services have become a mainstream product for a long time to bypass these location code barriers and add a layer of obscurity to your personal computer. In a way, the VPN application is supposed to help keep you safer on the internet, but when a nefarious group is the developer of the VPN, they can use this to their advantage. In this case, the bot software that was pushed to over two-million TVs came from hackers pushing code to the VPN and faking an automatic update to TVs, resulting in users applying what they thought was a software update from their TV manufacturer, only to add the bot to the TV and joining the virtual army in an unprecedented attack against several different streaming platforms.

I wanted you to be aware of this attack so that you can realize that it is extremely difficult to remain “safe” on the internet, and trusting just one wrong source for your software can cause global impact. The use of these VPN services to protect your privacy turned out giving hackers more tools to attack the public. I am of the opinion that as AI gets more advanced, it is only a matter of time before we have AI attacking AI and bringing our computer infrastructure down. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.