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How ’bout that Mirai Botnet
Do you remember that thing? It was the panic of the week last fall. Some jerks took large portions of the internet down for a couple hours. Everyone was in a tizzy for a bit. Well, the problem is still there. At least now nobody’s in a flail-your-arms panic over it, so maybe it’s worth discussing solutions.
Since there’s very little reason to remember the panic of the day even a week later, let me remind you how this works. A couple years back “Internet of Things” became the fashionable buzzword, so we all went out and bought WiFi enabled toasters. Now you can start toasting automatically when your alarm clock goes off. The fact that your toast will be ice cold by your seventh snooze is a small price to pay for living in The Future! But when you got your FutureToast, you didn’t bother to change the default password (it’s a hassle and if you did you’d forget the new one and what’s the worst that could happen anyway?) Mr. Nefarious Hacker sees that you’ve got a FutureToast, and he can log into it too. With your toaster and the 13,000 other ones that nobody’s changed the passwords on (and the 3300 GarageNoMores, and 4200 BlindsWithScience, and 132 HubCapConnects) he’s got access to a massive number internet connected devices. Mr. Nefarious Hacker can then use them to form punishing denial of service attacks, making the internet useless to the rest of us.
How do we solve this problem? It seems resistant to market forces. From FutureToast Inc.’s perspective adding security to their toasters makes them cost more and makes them less user friendly. That translates to less toaster sales. The Customer doesn’t care; the fact that his toaster is a tool for world domination doesn’t stop it from providing toast on demand.
If you ask the computer security industry, they tend to tell you “Government Regulation.” Every FutureToast variant has to have a password change on first boot up, mandated by law. This solves the problem in the future, but there’s still a heck of a lot of unsecured devices in existence today. The government is also a good way to take all the vitality out of an industry. Maybe there are better solutions.
You could educate the public. As a rule that never works. Take me as an example. I know this is a thing, and I think it’s a big enough problem to post about it on Ricochet. Now ask me what my password is for my Raspberry Pi. It’s not hard to guess.
You could hack back. If you go into my FutureToast and change the passwords then Mr. Nefarious Hacker can’t use it. But then I can’t use it anymore, either. That approach amounts to the destruction of property. This is also not a good solution.
You could, and I can’t overstate the general applicability of this solution, actively wait for your problem to go away. We haven’t seen Mirai in the news much at all even though nobody’s fixed the problem. Maybe the world wakes up and realizes their fridge really shouldn’t have anything to say to their toilet and they stop buying IoT devices. Maybe we figure out a better way to catch the people behind these attacks and launching them becomes a much riskier proposition. Maybe Russia gets into a war with China and the world’s supply of hackers gets busy fighting one another. Maybe none of those happen and we’re still stuck with the problem.
What do you think, Ricochet? Got any brilliant ideas?
Published in Technology
You’re using your fingers as binary digits. So your fingers are either on or off, one or zero. You can count to one with your first finger, but to get to the number 2 by counting, you’re going to need the second finger, just like you need two digits for the number 10 in base 10; even though there are ten possible values in a single digit, it takes two digits to express the number 10. Back to binary and it’s three fingers for the number 4, four fingers for the number 8; continue that across all your fingers and you’ll find you need all ten fingers to get to 512, as 1000000000. Fill in all the rest of those digits with ones and it’s only 1023.
I think so. The way we are talking about ‘counting’ on fingers is by letting each finger represent one bit, rather than simply counting 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 on one hand, for example. Instead, we are representing the value 8 by extending the middle finger only. In this manner, when all ten fingers are extended, i.e., ‘on’, the value represented is 2^9+2^8+2^7+2^6+2^5+2^4+2^3+2^2+2^1+2^0. (The first finger is 2^0 = 1) so 512+256+128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1=1023
Fine. Now I get it. Picture me counting to 8. :)
I think you mean 4.
(Going into extra innings on pedantic.)
Or 132, for emphasis.
Damn it I do mean 4. Argh!
One of the great things about computers is their ability to express themselves in decimal. Starman Jones was wrong.
I considered that, but was too lazy. They way this discussion has worked out for me it’s better that I left it alone.
I finally remembered the thumb, so it made sense.
Unless, I suppose, the Astrogators Guild restricted computer development to preserve their perquisites.
Is one of those this:
3-D loser?
Guess not.
Looks like we killed this thread. Sorry Hank.
yep. now we don’t even need an abacus let alone wifi enabled toasters
I’ll restart it. For those of you talking about buying only non-wifi enabled appliances, that’s fine for as long as you can buy them. Sure, that’s not an issue with toasters right now, but for those of you who still play DVDs, try to find a player that isn’t enabled for an Internet connection. They don’t exist anymore.
I expect the same will happen with any appliance where they decide it’s useful.
What would be pedantic would be pointing out that 4 bits is 50 cents.
Modern video game consoles are powerful computers which manufacturers make only perfunctory efforts to secure.
I’m in favor of on.
Dunno, we’ve not used that feature.
Raspberry
You can find them but they’re usually off-brands like Coby, and also they’re usually junk.
That’s sort of how they did it in Dune. Although there it was because of the AI taking over.
I considered that you might start counting at one, and therefore closed fists would be 1024, but I quickly discarded it.
Yeah, I was wrong for sure. I eventually realized the source of my confusion. The fact that we have 10 fingers is mere happenstance, but I gave it significance and confused base 10 and base 1. That led me to look for comparable phenomenon in base 2, which, of course, don’t exist.
Right, because I’m not making binary jokes in the thick of it too. To borrow one from @samrhody
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand hexadecimal and F the rest.
You know I had to have been 30 before I caught the double meaning on raspberry there?
Which is fair. I’ve only got so much time to worry about my washing machine.
Spoken like an experienced woodworker.
You only support one end of the wood.