3 million smart toothbrushes were not used in a DDoS attack after all, but it could happen (2024)

FAQs

Were 3 million toothbrushes really used for a DDoS attack? ›

“The three million toothbrush botnet story isn't true,” Kevin Beaumont, a reputable cybersecurity researcher wrote on Mastodon, later describing it as “total bollocks”.

As many as three million smart toothbrushes were reportedly converted into a massive botnet to carry out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a Swiss company. According to Aargauer Zeitung, the cyberattack took down the company's website for several hours.

Update 2 — 2/9/2024 6:30am PT: The security company at the nexus of the original report that three million toothbrushes were used in a DDOS attack has now retracted the story and claimed it was a result of a mistranslation — but according to the news outlet that published the initial report, that statement isn't true.

What's happening: Swiss outlet Aargauer Zeitung published a story last week claiming that hackers had launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against roughly 3 million internet-connected toothbrushes, causing damage to the tune of millions of euros.

KGTV) — A story you may have seen claims millions of hacked toothbrushes were used in a Swiss cyber attack. That's fiction. Last week, a Swiss-German news site published a story that three million smart toothbrushes had been hacked to conduct attacks against a company. But that wasn't the case.

There was about a 24-hour period where many news outlets reported on a reported DDoS attack that involved a botnet made up of thousands of internet-connected toothbrushes, it all started with one international newspaper report, and then was aggregated to death and spread quickly on social media.

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack involves a single machine used to either target a software vulnerability or flood a targeted resource with packets, requests or queries. A DDoS attack, however, uses multiple connected devices—often executed by botnets or, on occasion, by individuals who have coordinated their activity.

The term botnet is a portmanteau from the words robot and network and each infected device is called a bot. Botnets can be designed to accomplish illegal or malicious tasks including sending spam, stealing data, ransomware, fraudulently clicking on ads or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Triton is malware first discovered at a Saudi Arabian petrochemical plant in 2017. It can disable safety instrumented systems, which can then contribute to a plant disaster. It has been called "the world's most murderous malware."

What does a smart toothbrush do? ›

Smart toothbrushes capture brushing data through built-in smart sensors in the toothbrush head. These sensors analyze brush head pressure on the teeth, coverage, brushing duration and other inputs in real-time. They send that data to a connected device where it is analyzed.

According to a report by the Aargauer Zeitung (spotted by Tom's Hardware), hackers infected nearly three million electric toothbrushes to turn them into botnets. The report also notes that this army of connected dental cleansing tools was used in a DDoS attack on a Swiss company's website.

The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), 18 U.S.C. § 1030, is the primary federal statutory mechanism for prosecuting cybercrime, including hacking, and also applies to some related extortionate crimes such as in the context of ransomware.

A DDoS attack uses more than one unique IP address or machines, often from thousands of hosts infected with malware.

In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, multiple devices are used to overwhelm a targeted server with requests and take web applications offline. Some of the biggest DDoS attacks have made major tech headlines.

Attackers use malware and other techniques to compromise a device, turning it into a “zombie” in the attacker's botnet. Botnets enable attackers to carry out DDoS attacks by harnessing the power of many machines and obscuring the source of the traffic.

DDoS attacks are carried out with networks of Internet-connected machines. These networks consist of computers and other devices (such as IoT devices)which have been infected with malware, allowing them to be controlled remotely by an attacker.