Chinese firm recalls products linked to cyber attack
Updated: 2016-10-25 22:34
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A Chinese electronics component maker is recalling 4.3 million internet-connected camera products from the US market amid claims they may have played a role in last week's massive internet disruption.
Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology said on Monday that it was recalling earlier models of four kinds of cameras due to a security vulnerability that can make them easy to hack.
Millions of internet users lost access to some of the world's most popular websites last week after hackers hammered servers along the US East Coast with phony traffic until they crashed, then moved westward.
Security experts said easy-to-guess default passwords, used on Xiongmai webcams, aided the hackers who caused the disruption
"The main security problem is that users aren't changing the device's default passwords," Xiongmai said in a Chinese-language statement posted online.
The company rejected suggestions that its webcams made up the bulk of the devices used in the attacks.
"Security issues are a problem facing all mankind," it said. "Since industry giants have experienced them, Xiongmai is not afraid to experience them once, too."
According to security firm Flashpoint, malware known as Mirai has been exploiting the products from Xiongmai to launch massive distributed denial-of-service attacks, including the one on Oct 21 that slowed access to many popular sites, including Netflix, PayPal, and Twitter.
Companies observing the disruption said botnets powered by the Mirai malware were at least partly responsible for the attack.
Xiongmai, a maker of camera modules and DVR boards, has acknowledged that its products have been a target for hackers, but it said it patched the problem with the default passwords back in April 2015. For older products, the company has come up with a firmware update to fix the flaw.
The hackers who caused last week's the disruption hit Dyn, a provider of Domain Name System services. Agencies including the US Department of Homeland Security are investigating the outage but the perpetrators remain unknown.
The hackers launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack using tens of millions of malware-infected devices connected to the internet, according to Kyle York, Dyn's chief strategy officer. While DDoS attacks don't steal anything, they can create havoc across the internet.
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