Chinese firm admits its hacked DVRs, cameras were behind Friday's massive DDOS attack | PCWorld

Or as Benedict Evans noted in his latest weekly newsletter: "A network designed to withstand nuclear attack, brought down by toasters."

"A Chinese electronics component manufacturer says its products inadvertently played a role in a massive cyberattack that disrupted major internet sites in the U.S. on Friday.

Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a vendor behind DVRs and internet-connected cameras, said on Sunday that security vulnerabilities involving weak default passwords in its products were partly to blame.

According to security researchers, malware known as Mirai has been taking advantage of these vulnerabilities by infecting the devices and using them to launch huge distributed denial-of service attacks, including Friday’s outage."

Chinese firm admits its hacked DVRs, cameras were behind Friday's massive DDOS attack | PCWorld