Wouldn't it be costing the attacker some amount of money running the C&C server?
I'd think at some point if the attacker isn't getting the same results from the attack he'll wait for them to scale back then strike again.
Is my thinking right here?
I'd think at some point if the attacker isn't getting the same results from the attack he'll wait for them to scale back then strike again.
Is my thinking right here?
The average broadband user has at the least, 10Mbps/UP. If your smart appliances all started sending at least 10mbps up... you only need a million smart TV's to start causing damage.
I'm guessing there's 100M Smart TV's in the USA? Each sending 10Mb/s up? There's 1GB/s of traffic. Multiply this by the next 50 nations who have smart TVs and bandwidth to spare...
Then make it multiuple devices in a home. Then make it every smart device on the planet, using SOME bandwidth... it gets painful fast, and its free for the attackers, since the poor sap with a hacked smart TV is doing the work.
Unless they are using a setup like @tomschlick mentioned or some P2P thing.
For an attack of 1.2Tbps, you only need 120k devices at 10Mbps.
Makes me wonder when we'll start seeing reports of people getting hit with data overage charges because of hacked smart devices. I only have 4 Mbps up, but if an infected device used all of that 24/7 it would chew through my Comcast 1TB monthly cap.
Not necessarily. They could configure the C&C to run off of something like pastebin/gist where they just input a list of IPs to attack and the botnet checks a specific url every X minutes for new instructions.