Not since Orson Welles incited mass hysteria with his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast has a media event caused so much global panic.
First reported in a Swiss newspaper, the story of three million hacked toothbrushes repurposed as conscripts in a botnet army with the mission of taking down a Swiss company turns out to be more fiction than fact.
According to Fortinet, a security company that helped promote the story, a massive force of Terminator Toothbrushes did not cause millions of euros of financial damage:
“To clarify, the topic of toothbrushes being used for DDoS attacks was presented during an interview as an illustration of a given type of attack, and it is not based on research from Fortinet or FortiGuard Labs. It appears … the narrative on this topic has been stretched to the point where hypothetical and actual scenarios are blurred.”
Not so fast, though. Just because millions of sleeper agent toothbrushes weren’t activated to carry out cyber attacks doesn’t mean it couldn’t theoretically happen. It seems smart toothbrushes, smart refrigerators, smart electric blankets and smart bean bag chairs have very poor security and could be mobilized to carry out computer hacks at a massive scale.
The false alarm has incited deep paranoia among users of these ordinary household gadgets, with many living in fear of something as seemingly innocuous as a smart toaster or an internet lampshade. This has caused many to reimagine our dystopian future as one where humans become slaves to our home appliances.
Perhaps we’re already there.
If there is something 