Attacks on smart devices at home have “exploded” in the past year, turning your innocent looking tech into “exit points for other people’s traffic.” You won’t know until it’s too late. “Your internet works fine, your streaming doesn’t buffer, but somewhere in the background, your router is participating in vulnerability scans or brute-force attacks against servers around the world. You’re not the target—you’re the weapon.”
That’s the stark alert from GreyNoise, and follows a year in which the FBI and Google made headlines warning tens of millions of Android devices were infected with BADBOX 2.0 alone. The FBI says it affects “TV streaming devices, digital projectors, aftermarket vehicle infotainment systems, digital picture frames and other products.”
The good news is that you can now check if your IP address is on the naughty list. With the new GreyNoise IP Check, the team says, “you’ll know if that IP address has been caught scanning the internet or appears in our database of known business services.”
You don’t need to register, install any software or provide any details. It’s a quick, instant check. You’ll either be told “Your IP is clean” or you won’t.
“If your IP shows up as malicious or suspicious,” GreyNoise says, “that’s your cue to investigate. Something on your network is behaving badly. It might be malware on a laptop, a compromised smart TV, or a router that’s been conscripted into a botnet. The tool will show you when the activity was first and last observed, what kinds of scanning behavior were detected, and point you toward next steps.”
With Santa finalizing his routes and refuelling his reindeer in readiness for the big day, hundreds of millions of smart devices are set to be unwrapped, switched on and connected to home networks. Most of those device will have come from China, with limited if any security onboard. And most will connect to the open internet.
The reality is you won’t ever update the firmware on these edge devices or change the admin password — if that’s possible. Have you even done that for your home router?
You can run the GreyNoise IP Check here.
Pause any VPN and do that now.
