IoT as a Land of Opportunity for DDoS Hackers

In 2016, Mirai showed the destructive potential of a botnet composed exclusively of Internet of Things devices. To evaluate the current state of anti-DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) protection for such devices, the authors studied webcams—discovered by Shodan—and found that most have little to no firewall protection and, as such, are vulnerable to future direct and reflective DDoS attacks.