ATM “jackpotting” — a sophisticated crime in which thieves install malicious software and/or hardware at ATMs that forces the machines to spit out huge volumes of cash on demand — has long been a threat for banks in Europe and Asia, yet these attacks somehow have eluded U.S. ATM operators. But all that changed this week after the U.S. Secret Service quietly began warning financial institutions that jackpotting attacks have now been spotted targeting cash machines here in the United States.

To carry out a jackpotting attack, thieves first must gain physical access to the cash machine. From there they can use malware or specialized electronics — often a combination of both — to control the operations of the ATM.

On Jan. 21, 2018, KrebsOnSecurity began hearing rumblings about jackpotting attacks, also known as “logical attacks,” hitting U.S. ATM operators. I quickly reached out to ATM giant NCR Corp. to see if they’d heard anything. NCR said at the time it had received unconfirmed reports, but nothing solid yet.

On Jan. 26, NCR sent an advisory to its customers saying it had received reports from the Secret Service and other sources about jackpotting attacks against ATMs in the United States.

“While at present these appear focused on non-NCR ATMs, logical attacks are an industry-wide issue,” the NCR alert reads. “This represents the first confirmed cases of losses due to logical attacks in the US. This should be treated as a call to action to take appropriate steps to protect their ATMs against these forms of attack and mitigate any consequences.”

The NCR memo does not mention the type of jackpotting malware used against U.S. ATMs. But a source close to the matter said the Secret Service is warning that organized criminal gangs have been attacking stand-alone ATMs in the United States using “Ploutus.D,” an advanced strain of jackpotting malware first spotted in 2013.

According to that source — who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak on the record — the Secret Service has received credible information that crooks are activating so-called “cash out crews” to attack front-loading ATMs manufactured by ATM vendor Diebold Nixdorf.

The source said the Secret Service is warning that thieves appear to be targeting Opteva 500 and 700 series Dielbold ATMs using the Ploutus.D malware in a series of coordinated attacks over the past 10 days, and that there is evidence that further attacks are being planned across the country.

“The targeted stand-alone ATMs are routinely located in pharmacies, big box retailers, and drive-thru ATMs,” reads a confidential Secret Service alert sent to multiple financial institutions and obtained by KrebsOnSecurity. “During previous attacks, fraudsters dressed as ATM technicians and attached a laptop computer with a mirror image of the ATMs operating system along with a mobile device to the targeted ATM.”

Reached for comment, Diebold shared an alert it sent to customers Friday warning of potential jackpotting attacks in the United States. Diebold’s alert confirms the attacks so far appear to be targeting front-loaded Opteva cash machines.

“As in Mexico last year, the attack mode involves a series of different steps to overcome security mechanism and the authorization process for setting the communication with the [cash] dispenser,” the Diebold security alert reads. A copy of the entire Diebold alert, complete with advice on how to mitigate these attacks, is available here (PDF).

The Secret Service alert explains that the attackers typically use an endoscope — a slender, flexible instrument traditionally used in medicine to give physicians a look inside the human body — to locate the internal portion of the cash machine where they can attach a cord that allows them to sync their laptop with the ATM’s computer.

“Once this is complete, the ATM is controlled by the fraudsters and the ATM will appear Out of Service to potential customers,” reads the confidential Secret Service alert.

At this point, the crook(s) installing the malware will contact co-conspirators who can remotely control the ATMs and force the machines to dispense cash.

“In previous Ploutus.D attacks, the ATM continuously dispensed at a rate of 40 bills every 23 seconds,” the alert continues. Once the dispense cycle starts, the only way to stop it is to press cancel on the keypad. Otherwise, the machine is completely emptied of cash, according to the alert.

An 2017 analysis of Ploutus.D by security firm FireEye called it “one of the most advanced ATM malware families we’ve seen in the last few years.”

“Discovered for the first time in Mexico back in 2013, Ploutus enabled criminals to empty ATMs using either an external keyboard attached to the machine or via SMS message, a technique that had never been seen before,” FireEye’s Daniel Regalado wrote.

According to FireEye, the Ploutus attacks seen so far require thieves to somehow gain physical access to an ATM — either by picking its locks, using a stolen master key or otherwise removing or destroying part of the machine.

Regalado says the crime gangs typically responsible for these attacks deploy “money mules” to conduct the attacks and siphon cash from ATMs. The term refers to low-level operators within a criminal organization who are assigned high-risk jobs, such as installing ATM skimmers and otherwise physically tampering with cash machines.

“From there, the attackers can attach a physical keyboard to connect to the machine, and [use] an activation code provided by the boss in charge of the operation in order to dispense money from the ATM,” he wrote. “Once deployed to an ATM, Ploutus makes it possible for criminals to obtain thousands of dollars in minutes. While there are some risks of the money mule being caught by cameras, the speed in which the operation is carried out minimizes the mule’s risk.”

Indeed, the Secret Service memo shared by my source says the cash out crew/money mules typically take the dispensed cash and place it in a large bag. After the cash is taken from the ATM and the mule leaves, the phony technician(s) return to the site and remove their equipment from the compromised ATM.

“The last thing the fraudsters do before leaving the site is to plug the Ethernet cable back in,” the alert notes.

FireEye said all of the samples of Ploutus.D it examined targeted Diebold ATMs, but it warned that small changes to the malware’s code could enable it to be used against 40 different ATM vendors in 80 countries.

The Secret Service alert says ATMs still running on Windows XP are particularly vulnerable, and it urged ATM operators to update to a version of Windows 7 to defeat this specific type of attack.

This is a quickly developing story and may be updated multiple times over the next few days as more information becomes available.

KrebsOnSecurity has long warned readers to plant your own flag at the my Social Security online portal of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) — even if you are not yet drawing benefits from the agency — because identity thieves have been registering accounts in peoples’ names and siphoning retirement and/or disability funds. This is the story of a Midwest couple that took all the right precautions and still got hit by ID thieves who impersonated them to the SSA directly over the phone.

In mid-December 2017 this author heard from Ed Eckenstein, a longtime reader in Oklahoma whose wife Ruth had just received a snail mail letter from the SSA about successfully applying to withdraw benefits. The letter confirmed she’d requested a one-time transfer of more than $11,000 from her SSA account. The couple said they were perplexed because both previously had taken my advice and registered accounts with MySocialSecurity, even though Ruth had not yet chosen to start receiving SSA benefits.

Sure enough, when Ruth logged into her MySocialSecurity account online, there was a pending $11,665 withdrawal destined to be deposited into a Green Dot prepaid debit card account (funds deposited onto a Green Dot card can be spent like cash at any store that accepts credit or debit cards). The $11,655 amount was available for a one-time transfer because it was intended to retroactively cover monthly retirement payments back to her 65th birthday.

The letter the Eckensteins received from the SSA indicated that the benefits had been requested over the phone, meaning the crook(s) had called the SSA pretending to be Ruth and supplied them with enough information about her to enroll her to begin receiving benefits. Ed said he and his wife immediately called the SSA to notify them of fraudulent enrollment and pending withdrawal, and they were instructed to appear in person at an SSA office in Oklahoma City.

The SSA ultimately put a hold on the fraudulent $11,665 transfer, but Ed said it took more than four hours at the SSA office to sort it all out. Mr. Eckenstein said the agency also informed them that the thieves had signed his wife up for disability payments. In addition, her profile at the SSA had been changed to include a phone number in the 786 area code (Miami, Fla.).

“They didn’t change the physical address perhaps thinking that would trigger a letter to be sent to us,” Ed explained.

Thankfully, the SSA sent a letter anyway. Ed said many additional hours spent researching the matter with SSA personnel revealed that in order to open the claim on Ruth’s retirement benefits, the thieves had to supply the SSA with a short list of static identifiers about her, including her birthday, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, current address and phone number.

Unfortunately, most (if not all) of this data is available on a broad swath of the American populace for free online (think Zillow, Ancestry.com, Facebook, etc.) or else for sale in the cybercrime underground for about the cost of a latte at Starbucks.

The Eckensteins thought the matter had been resolved until Jan. 14, when Ruth received a 1099 form from the SSA indicating they’d reported to the IRS that she had in fact received an $11,665 payment.

“We’ve emailed our tax guy for guidance on how to deal with this on our taxes,” Mr. Eckenstein wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity. “My wife logged into SSA portal and there was a note indicating that corrected/updated 1099s would be available at the end of the month. She’s not sure whether that message was specific to her or whether everyone’s seeing that.”

NOT SMALL IF IT HAPPENS TO YOU

Identity thieves have been exploiting authentication weaknesses to divert retirement account funds almost since the SSA launched its portal eight years ago. But the crime really picked up in 2013, around the same time KrebsOnSecurity first began warning readers to register their own accounts at the MySSA portal. That uptick coincided with a move by the U.S. Treasury to start requiring that all beneficiaries receive payments through direct deposit (though the SSA says paper checks are still available to some beneficiaries under limited circumstances).

More than 34 million Americans now conduct business with the Social Security Administration (SSA) online. A story this week from Reuters says the SSA doesn’t track data on the prevalence of identity theft. Nevertheless, the agency assured the news outlet that its anti-fraud efforts have made the problem “very rare.”

But Reuters notes that a 2015 investigation by the SSA’s Office of Inspector General investigation identified more than 30,000 suspicious MySSA registrations, and more than 58,000 allegations of fraud related to MySSA accounts from February 2013 to February 2016.

“Those figures are small in the context of overall MySSA activity – but it will not seem small if it happens to you,” writes Mark Miller for Reuters.

The SSA has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Ed and Ruth’s experience notwithstanding, it’s still a good idea to set up a MySSA account — particularly if you or your spouse will be eligible to withdraw benefits soon. The agency has been trying to beef up online authentication for citizens logging into its MySSA portal. Last summer the SSA began requiring all users to enter a username and password in addition to a one-time security code sent their email or phone, although as previously reported here that authentication process could be far more robust.

The Reuters story reminds readers to periodically use the MySSA portal to check and make sure that your personal information – such as date of birth and mailing address – are correct. “For current beneficiaries, if you notice that a monthly payment has not arrived, you should notify the SSA immediately via the agency’s toll-free line (1-800-772-1213) or at your local field office,” Miller advised. “In most cases, the SSA will make you whole if the theft is reported quickly.”

Another option is to use the SSA’s “Block Electronic Access” feature, which blocks any automatic telephone or online access to your Social Security record – including by you (although it’s unclear if blocking access this way would have stopped ID thieves who manage to speak with a live SSA representative). To restore electronic access, you’ll need to contact the Social Security Administration and provide proof of your identity.

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, said today it is in the process of rolling out a new service designed to help companies more quickly make sense of and act on the mountains of threat data produced each day by cybersecurity tools.

Countless organizations rely on a hodgepodge of security software, hardware and services to find and detect cybersecurity intrusions before an incursion by malicious software or hackers has the chance to metastasize into a full-blown data breach.

The problem is that the sheer volume of data produced by these tools is staggering and increasing each day, meaning already-stretched IT staff often miss key signs of an intrusion until it’s too late.

Enter “Chronicle,” a nascent platform that graduated from the tech giant’s “X” division, which is a separate entity tasked with tackling hard-to-solve problems with an eye toward leveraging the company’s core strengths: Massive data analytics and storage capabilities, machine learning and custom search capabilities.

“We want to 10x the speed and impact of security teams’ work by making it much easier, faster and more cost-effective for them to capture and analyze security signals that have previously been too difficult and expensive to find,” wrote Stephen Gillett, CEO of the new venture.

Few details have been released yet about how exactly Chronicle will work, although the company did say it would draw in part on data from VirusTotal, a free service acquired by Google in 2012 that allows users to scan suspicious files against dozens of commercial antivirus tools simultaneously.

Gillett said his division is already trialing the service with several Fortune 500 firms to test the preview release of Chronicle, but the company declined to name any of those participating.

ANALYSIS

It’s not terribly clear from Gillett’s post or another blog post from Alphabet’s X division by Astro Teller how exactly Chronicle will differentiate itself in such a crowded market for cybersecurity offerings. But it’s worth considering the impact that VirusTotal has had over the years.

Currently, VirusTotal handles approximately one million submissions each day. The results of each submission get shared back with the entire community of antivirus vendors who lend their tools to the service — which allows each vendor to benefit by adding malware signatures for new variants that their tools missed but that a preponderance of other tools flagged as malicious.

Naturally, cybercriminals have responded by creating their own criminal versions of VirusTotal: So-called “no distribute” scanners. These services cater to malware authors, and use the same stable of antivirus tools, except they prevent these tools from phoning home to the antivirus companies about new, unknown variants.

On balance, it’s difficult to know whether the benefit that antivirus companies — and by extension their customers — gain by partnering with VirusTotal outweighs the mayhem enabled by these no-distribute scanners. But it seems clear that VirusTotal has helped antivirus companies and their customers do a better job focusing on threats that really matter, as opposed to chasing after (or cleaning up after) so-called “false positives,” — benign files that erroneously get flagged as malicious.

And this is precisely the signal-to-noise challenge created by the proliferation of security tools used in a typical organization today: How to spend more of your scarce cybersecurity workforce, budget and time identifying and stopping the threats that matter and less time sifting through noisy but otherwise time-wasting alerts triggered by non-threats.

I’m not a big listener of podcasts, but I do find myself increasingly making time to listen to Risky Business, a podcast produced by Australian cybersecurity journalist Patrick Gray. Responding to today’s announcement on Chronicle, Gray said he likewise had few details about it but was looking forward to learning more.

“Google has so much data and so many amazing internal resources that my gut reaction is to think this new company could be a meteor aimed at planet Threat Intel™️,” Gray quipped on Twitter, referring to the burgeoning industry of companies competing to help companies trying to identify new threats and attack trends. “Imagine if other companies spin out their tools…Netflix, Amazon, Facebook etc. That could be a fundamentally reshaped industry.”

Well said. I also look forward to hearing more about how Chronicle works and, more importantly, if it works.

Full disclosure: Since September 2016, KrebsOnSecurity has received protection against massive online attacks from Project Shield, a free anti-distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) offering provided by Jigsaw — another subsidiary of Google’s parent company. Project Shield provides DDoS protection for news, human rights, and elections monitoring Web sites.

In December 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice announced indictments and guilty pleas by three men in the United States responsible for creating and using Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves poorly-secured “Internet of Things” or IoT devices like security cameras and digital video recorders for use in large-scale cyberattacks.

The FBI and the DOJ had help in their investigation from many security experts, but this post focuses on one expert whose research into the Dark Web and its various malefactors was especially useful in that case. Allison Nixon is director of security research at Flashpoint, a cyber intelligence firm based in New York City. Nixon spoke with KrebsOnSecurity at length about her perspectives on IoT security and the vital role of law enforcement in this fight.

Brian Krebs (BK): Where are we today with respect to IoT security? Are we better off than were a year ago, or is the problem only worse?

Allison Nixon (AN): In some aspects we’re better off. The arrests that happened over the last year in the DDoS space, I would call that a good start, but we’re not out of the woods yet and we’re nowhere near the end of anything.

BK: Why not?

AN: Ultimately, what’s going with these IoT botnets is crime. People are talking about these cybersecurity problems — problems with the devices, etc. — but at the end of the day it’s crime and private citizens don’t have the power to make these bad actors stop.

BK: Certainly security professionals like yourself and others can be diligent about tracking the worst actors and the crime machines they’re using, and in reporting those systems when it’s advantageous to do so?

AN: That’s a fair argument. I can send abuse complaints to servers being used maliciously. And people can write articles that name individuals. However, it’s still a limited kind of impact. I’ve seen people get named in public and instead of stopping, what they do is improve their opsec [operational security measures] and keep doing the same thing but just sneakier. In the private sector, we can frustrate things, but we can’t actually stop them in the permanent, sanctioned way that law enforcement can. We don’t really have that kind of control.

BK: How are we not better off?

AN: I would say that as time progresses, the community that practices DDoS and malicious hacking and these pointless destructive attacks get more technically proficient when they’re executing attacks, and they just become a more difficult adversary.

BK: A more difficult adversary?

AN: Well, if you look at the individuals that were the subject of the announcement this month, and you look in their past, you can see they’ve been active in the hacking community a long time. Litespeed [the nickname used by Josiah White, one of the men who pleaded guilty to authoring Mirai] has been credited with lots of code.  He’s had years to develop and as far as I could tell he didn’t stop doing criminal activity until he got picked up by law enforcement.

BK: It seems to me that the Mirai authors probably would not have been caught had they never released the source code for their malware. They said they were doing so because multiple law enforcement agencies and security researchers were hot on their trail and they didn’t want to be the only ones holding the source code when the cops showed up at their door. But if that was really their goal in releasing it, doing so seems to have had the exact opposite effect. What’s your take on that?

AN: You are absolutely, 100 million percent correct. If they just shut everything down and left, they’d be fine now. The fact that they dumped the source was a tipping point of sorts. The damages they caused at that time were massive, but when they dumped the source code the amount of damage their actions contributed to ballooned [due to the proliferation of copycat Mirai botnets]. The charges against them specified their actions in infecting the machines they controlled, but when it comes to what interested researchers in the private sector, the moment they dumped the source code — that’s the most harmful act they did out of the entire thing.

BK: Do you believe their claimed reason for releasing the code?

AN: I believe it. They claimed they released it because they wanted to hamper investigative efforts to find them. The problem is that not only is it incorrect, it also doesn’t take into account the researchers on the other end of the spectrum who have to pick from many targets to spend their time looking at. Releasing the source code changed that dramatically. It was like catnip to researchers, and was just a new thing for researchers to look at and play with and wonder who wrote it.

If they really wanted to stay off law enforcement’s radar, they would be as low profile as they could and not be interesting. But they did everything wrong: They dumped the source code and attacked a security researcher using tools that are interesting to security researchers. That’s like attacking a dog with a steak. I’m going to wave this big juicy steak at a dog and that will teach him. They made every single mistake in the book.

BK: What do you think it is about these guys that leads them to this kind of behavior? Is it just a kind of inertia that inexorably leads them down a slippery slope if they don’t have some kind of intervention?

AN: These people go down a life path that does not lead them to a legitimate livelihood. They keep doing this and get better at it and they start to do these things that really can threaten the Internet as a whole. In the case of these DDoS botnets, it’s worrying that these individuals are allowed to go this deep before law enforcement catches them.

BK: There was a narrative that got a lot of play recently, and it was spun by a self-described Internet vigilante who calls himself “the Janitor.” He claimed to have been finding zero-day exploits in IoT devices so that he could shut down insecure IoT things that can’t really be secured before or maybe even after they have been compromised by IoT threats like Mirai. The Janitor says he released a bunch of his code because he’s tired of being the unrecognized superhero that he is, and many in the media seem to have eaten this up and taken his manifesto as gospel. What’s your take on the Janitor, and his so-called “bricker bot” project?

AN: I have to think about how to choose my words, because I don’t want to give anyone bad ideas. But one thing to keep in mind is that his method of bricking IoT devices doesn’t work, and it potentially makes the problem worse.

BK: What do you mean exactly?

AN: The reason is sometimes IoT malware like Mirai will try to close the door behind it, by crashing the telnet process that was used to infect the device [after the malware is successfully installed]. This can block other telnet-based malware from getting on the machine. And there’s a lot of this type of King of the Hill stuff going on in the IoT ecosystem right now.

But what [this bricker bot] malware does is a lot times it reboots a machine, and when the device is in that state the vulnerable telnet service goes back up. It used to be a lot of devices were infected with the very first Mirai, and when the [control center] for that botnet went down they were orphaned. We had a bunch of Mirai infections phoning home to nowhere. So there’s a real risk of taking the machine that was in the this weird state and making it vulnerable again.

BK: Hrm. That’s a very different story from the one told by the Bricker bot author. According to him, he spent several years of his life saving the world from certain doom at the hands of IoT devices. He even took credit for foiling the Mirai attacks on Deutsche Telekom. Could this just be a case of researcher exaggerating his accomplishments? Do you think his Bricker bot code ever really spread that far?

AN: I don’t have any evidence that there was mass exploitation by Bricker bot. I know his code was published. But when I talk to anyone running an IoT honeypot [a collection of virtual or vulnerable IoT devices designed to attract and record novel attacks against the devices] they have never seen it. The consensus is that regardless of peoples’ opinion on it we haven’t seen it in our honeypots. And considering the diversity of IoT honeypots out there today, if it was out there in real life we would have seen it by now.

BK: A lot of people believe that we’re focusing on the wrong solutions to IoT security — that having consumers lock down IoT devices security-wise or expecting law enforcement agencies to fix this problem for us for me are pollyannish ideas that in any case don’t address the root cause: Which is that there are a lot of companies producing crap IoT products that have virtually no security. What’s your take?

AN: The way I approach this problem is I see law enforcement as the ultimate end goal for all of these efforts. When I look at the IoT DDoS activity and the actual human beings doing this, the vast majority of Mirai attacks, attack infrastructure, malware variants and new exploits are coming from a vast minority of people doing this. That said, the way I perceive the underground ecosystem is probably different than the way most people perceive it.

BK: What’s the popular perception, do you think?

AN: It’s that, “Oh hey, one guy got arrested, great, but another guy will just take his place.” People compare it to a drug dealer on the street corner, but I don’t think that’s accurate in this case. The difference is when you’re looking at advanced criminal hacking campaigns, there’s not usually a replacement person waiting in the wings. These are incredibly deep skills developed over years. The people doing innovations in DDoS attacks and those who are driving the field forward are actually very few. So when you can ID them and attach behavior to the perpetrator, you realize there’s only a dozen people I need to care about and the world suddenly becomes a lot smaller.

BK: So do you think the efforts to force manufacturers to harden their products are a waste of time?

AN: I want to make it clear that all these different ways to tackle the problem…I don’t want to say one is more important than the other. I just happened to be working on one component of it. There’s definitely a lot of disagreement on this. I totally recognize this as a legitimate approach. A lot of people think the way forward is to focus on making sure the devices are secure. And there are efforts ongoing to help device manufacturers create more secure devices that are more resistant to these efforts.

And a lot is changing, although slowly. Do you remember way back when you bought a Wi-Fi router and it was open by default? Because the end user was obligated to change the default password, we had open Wi-Fi networks everywhere. As years passed, many manufacturers started making them more secure. For example, many of these devices now have customers refer to sticker on the machine that has a unique Wi-Fi password. That type of shift may be an example of what we can see in the future of IoT security.

BK: In the wake of the huge attacks from Mirai in 2016 and 2017, several lawmakers have proposed solutions. What do you think of the idea that it doesn’t matter what laws we pass in the United States that might require more security by IoT makers, that those makers are just going to keep on ignoring best practices when it comes to security?

AN: It’s easy to get cynical about this and a lot of people definitely feel like these these companies don’t sell directly to the U.S. and therefore don’t care about such efforts. Maybe in the short term that might be true, but in the long term I think it ends up biting them if they continue to not care.

Ultimately, these things just catch up with you if you have a reputation for making a poor product. What if you had a reputation for making a device that if you put it on the Internet it would reboot every five minutes because it’s getting attacked? Even if we did enact security requirements for IoT that manufacturers not in the U.S. wouldn’t have to follow, it would still in their best interests to care, because they are going to care sooner or later.

BK: I was on a Justice Department conference call with other journalists on the day they announced the Mirai author arrests and guilty pleas, and someone asked why this case was prosecuted out of Alaska. The answer that came back was that a great many of the machines infected with Mirai were in Alaska. But it seems more likely that it was because there was an FBI agent there who decided this was an important case but who actually had a very difficult time finding enough infected systems to reach the threshold needed to prosecute the case. What’s your read on that?

AN: I think that this case is probably going to set precedent in terms of the procedures and processes used to go after cybercrime. I’m sure you finished reading The Wired article about the Alaska investigation into Mirai: It goes in to detail about some of the difficult things that the Alaska FBI field office had to do to satisfy the legal requirements to take the case. Just to prove they had jurisdiction, they had to find a certain number of infected machines in Alaska.

Those were not easy to find, and in fact the FBI traveled far and wide in order to find these machines in Alaska. There are all kinds of barriers big and small that slow down the legal process for prosecuting cases like this, some of which are legitimate and some that I think are going to end up being streamlined after a case like this. And every time a successful case like this goes through [to a guilty plea], it makes it more possible for future cases to succeed.

This one group [that was the subject of the Mirai investigation] was the worst of the worst in this problem area. And right now it’s a huge victory for law enforcement to take down one group that is the worst of the worst in one problem area. Hopefully, it will lead to the takedown of many groups causing damage and harming people.

But the concept that in order for cybercriminals to get law enforcement attention they need to make international headlines and cause massive damage needs to change. Most cybercriminals probably think that what they’re doing nobody is going to notice, and in a sense they’re correct because there is so much obvious criminal activity blatantly connected to specific individuals. And that needs to change.

BK: Is there anything we didn’t talk about related to IoT security, the law enforcement investigations into Mirai, or anything else you’d like to add?

AN: I want to extend my gratitude to the people in the security industry and network operator community who recognized the gravity of this threat early on. There are a lot of people who were not named [in the stories and law enforcement press releases about the Mirai arrests], and want to say thank you for all the help. This couldn’t have happened without you.

Most readers here have likely heard or read various prognostications about the impending doom from the proliferation of poorly-secured “Internet of Things” or IoT devices. Loosely defined as any gadget or gizmo that connects to the Internet but which most consumers probably wouldn’t begin to know how to secure, IoT encompasses everything from security cameras, routers and digital video recorders to printers, wearable devices and “smart” lightbulbs.

Throughout 2016 and 2017, attacks from massive botnets made up entirely of hacked IoT devices had many experts warning of a dire outlook for Internet security. But the future of IoT doesn’t have to be so bleak. Here’s a primer on minimizing the chances that your IoT things become a security liability for you or for the Internet at large.

-Rule #1: Avoid connecting your devices directly to the Internet — either without a firewall or in front it, by poking holes in your firewall so you can access them remotely. Putting your devices in front of your firewall is generally a bad idea because many IoT products were simply not designed with security in mind and making these things accessible over the public Internet could invite attackers into your network. If you have a router, chances are it also comes with a built-in firewall. Keep your IoT devices behind the firewall as best you can.

-Rule #2: If you can, change the thing’s default credentials to a complex password that only you will know and can remember. And if you do happen to forget the password, it’s not the end of the world: Most devices have a recessed reset switch that can be used to restore to the thing to its factory-default settings (and credentials). Here’s some advice on picking better ones.

I say “if you can,” at the beginning of Rule #2 because very often IoT devices — particularly security cameras and DVRs — are so poorly designed from a security perspective that even changing the default password to the thing’s built-in Web interface does nothing to prevent the things from being reachable and vulnerable once connected to the Internet.

Also, many of these devices are found to have hidden, undocumented “backdoor” accounts that attackers can use to remotely control the devices. That’s why Rule #1 is so important.

-Rule #3: Update the firmware. Hardware vendors sometimes make available security updates for the software that powers their consumer devices (known as “firmware). It’s a good idea to visit the vendor’s Web site and check for any firmware updates before putting your IoT things to use, and to check back periodically for any new updates.

-Rule #4: Check the defaults, and make sure features you may not want or need like UPnP (Universal Plug and Play — which can easily poke holes in your firewall without you knowing it) — are disabled.

Want to know if something has poked a hole in your router’s firewall? Censys has a decent scanner that may give you clues about any cracks in your firewall. Browse to whatismyipaddress.com, then cut and paste the resulting address into the text box at Censys.io, select “IPv4 hosts” from the drop-down menu, and hit “search.”

If that sounds too complicated (or if your ISP’s addresses are on Censys’s blacklist) check out Steve Gibson‘s Shield’s Up page, which features a point-and-click tool that can give you information about which network doorways or “ports” may be open or exposed on your network. A quick Internet search on exposed port number(s) can often yield useful results indicating which of your devices may have poked a hole.

If you run antivirus software on your computer, consider upgrading to a “network security” or “Internet security” version of these products, which ship with more full-featured software firewalls that can make it easier to block traffic going into and out of specific ports.

Alternatively, Glasswire is a useful tool that offers a full-featured firewall as well as the ability to tell which of your applications and devices are using the most bandwidth on your network. Glasswire recently came in handy to help me determine which application was using gigabytes worth of bandwidth each day (it turned out to be a version of Amazon Music’s software client that had a glitchy updater).

-Rule #5: Avoid IoT devices that advertise Peer-to-Peer (P2P) capabilities built-in. P2P IoT devices are notoriously difficult to secure, and research has repeatedly shown that they can be reachable even through a firewall remotely over the Internet because they’re configured to continuously find ways to connect to a global, shared network so that people can access them remotely. For examples of this, see previous stories here, including This is Why People Fear the Internet of Things, and Researchers Find Fresh Fodder for IoT Attack Cannons.

-Rule #6: Consider the cost. Bear in mind that when it comes to IoT devices, cheaper usually is not better. There is no direct correlation between price and security, but history has shown the devices that tend to be toward the lower end of the price ranges for their class tend to have the most vulnerabilities and backdoors, with the least amount of vendor upkeep or support.

In the wake of last month’s guilty pleas by several individuals who created Mirai — one of the biggest IoT malware threats ever — the U.S. Justice Department released a series of tips on securing IoT devices.

One final note: I realize that the people who probably need to be reading these tips the most likely won’t ever know they need to care enough to act on them. But at least by taking proactive steps, you can reduce the likelihood that your IoT things will contribute to the global IoT security problem.