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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Study: Attack on Krebs OnSecurity Cost IoT Device Owners $323K

Summary: A UC Berkeley School of Information paper, "rIoT: Quantifying Consumer Costs of Insecure Internet of Things Devices," estimates that the Mirai botnet attack on KrebsOnSecurity.com in September 2016 cost the owners of the 24,000 infected IoT devices a total of $323,973.75 in added bandwidth and power consumption, or about $13.50 per device. That attack force, a slice of a botnet that had already enslaved more than 600,000 devices, hit the site with blasts of up to 620 Gbps for several days, and Akamai dropped the site as a pro-bono customer before Google's Project Shield restored it.

What's compelling: The attacker rented the 24,000-device army for a few hundred dollars, mitigation would have run into the millions, and the device owners bore roughly $13.50 each - an asymmetry the researchers attribute to IoT security being an externality that manufacturers and consumers have little incentive to fix.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

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Malware
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