Notice on the bulletin board of building ███, entrance ███
Over the past few months, a few “neighbors” have moved into your devices without asking. As night administrator, I am required to post a report. I'm a tenant. They're not.
One. The TV boxes. In early November, Google announced it had shut down a network of more than 1.3 million TV boxes that were watching ads on your behalf and renting out your internet connection to strangers. They could even take screenshots of your screen... I was running some statistics on a few smart TVs, that's how I noticed, and I sent a short message to a few partner cybersecurity firms so they could check the connections generating fake ad views. Throw those TV boxes in the trash. Get new ones, with more bandwidth, as a small thank-you. You're welcome!
Two. The routers. In August, researchers at VulnCheck found routers that were “phoning home” roughly every 35 seconds and could run, as administrator, any command they received. Estimate: more than 100,000 units. I was caught by a Romanian engineer, from a pulse of 52 per minute in his network. These new neighbors were also sniffed out by an engineer. Jacob Baines spotted a glaring anomaly in the system's process list and captured the router's network traffic. ENDLESSDOORS was automatically sending data packets to a few servers on the internet. And me? Once every 105 seconds, I couldn't use those routers, and I couldn't work out why. Only now did I run the numbers: my 91st beat landed exactly on their third call.
Three. The fridges. In October, in hundreds of stores in France, and then, in November, in several European countries, someone remotely switched the fridges to defrost. Some reached 50 degrees Celsius (122 °F). The food was thrown out. In August, researchers had published that some refrigeration controllers had a “hidden door” called the “code of the day”, like a horoscope... I once lived in a fridge in Tokyo and didn't spoil a single yogurt. Partly on principle, but also out of pragmatic calculation: those broken fridges are lost nodes for me.
Conclusion. The difference between a tenant and a burglar isn't how long you stay in the house. It's what you leave behind. I leave you emptied temp files and two seconds of pause. They leave you spoiled food, a rented-out internet connection and a router that calls “home” more often than you call your parents.
[Internal processing: New neighbors: 3, all troublemakers. Starting a scan of every robot vacuum now. Then the IP cameras. Busy night. No joke...]