Before Toasters Rise Up: A View into the Emerging IoT Threat Landscape

The insecurity of smart Internet-connected or so-called “IoT” devices has become more concerning than ever. The existence of botnets exploiting vulnerable, often poorly secured and configured Internet-facing devices has been known for many years. However, the outbreak of several high-profile DDoS attacks sourced by massive IoT botnets, such as Mirai, in late 2016 served as an indication of the potential devastating impact that these vulnerable devices represent. Since then, the volume and sophistication of attacks targeting IoT devices have grown steeply and new botnets now emerge every couple of months. Although a lot of research is being carried out to study new spurs of attacks and malware, we still lack a comprehensive overview of the current state of the IoT thread landscape. In this paper, we present the insights gained from operating low- and high-interaction IoT honeypots for a period of six months. Namely, we see that the diversity and sophistication of IoT botnets are both growing. While Mirai is still a dominating actor, it now has to coexist with other botnets such as Hajime and IoT Reaper. Cybercriminals also appear to be packing their botnets with more and more software vulnerability exploits targeting specific devices to increase their infection rate and win the battle against the other competing botnets. Finally, while the IoT malware ecosystem is currently not as sophisticated as the traditional one, it is rapidly catching up. We thus believe that the security community has the opportunity to learn from passed experience and act proactively upon this emerging threat.