Citizens of the internet may have noticed some speed related issues lately.  A malware attacking Internet Of Things devices (IP connected cameras, DVRs, cloud-based routers, etc) has been running rampant scanning the entire internet and launching major attacks from these devices.

“But Zack, I don’t have anything an attacker would want!”  Well, yes, you do.  Your internet connection, when combined with those of your friends, family, neighbors, and strangers who also bought a vulnerable device, can be used to bring down websites for a time.  Think of it as death by a thousand paper cuts.  All of the traffic caused by these devices overwhelms the target server and stops it from being able to handle any legitimate requests.  We call this a DDoS, a Distributed Denial of Service attack.  Does what it says on the tin, a bunch of things keep something else from providing a service.

“But wait!  I have a router and don’t forward any ports for my vulnerable thing!”  There’s a feature in most routers called Universal Plug & Play that will automatically expose desired services to the outside world.  This means that you may not even know about these devices being exposed to the outside world because it just happened automatically and your permission was never required.

I am not trying to say UP&P is a bad thing.  It simplifies a lot of things for people, especially anyone that uses gaming consoles or wants to be able to set their DVR to record something remotely.  It is certainly a big security risk especially since these things are exposed automatically without warning.  It is up to you to weigh the risk on leaving it enabled.