Your smart TV is under attack, new malware infects smart devices in 84 different countries

After hacking your laptop, computers and mobile phones now cybercriminals are writing malicious programs to attack your smart televisions. A US-based cybersecurity firm Barracuda Network said that a new malware has infected roughly 13,500 Internet of Things (IoT) devices like Android TVs in 84 countries, mostly in Asia, and that number is only growing.

Several cases of the new attack have been reported from Asian countries like China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, “Indian IoT devices haven’t been much in the radar of the cybercriminal organisations,” said Murali Urs, Country Manager-India, Barracuda Networks. But experts have warned that such attacks are only going to grow and India is a huge consumer of smart TVs, hackers will try to steal as much information for these smart devices.

WHAT IS THE NEW MALWARE:

• The malware – InterPlanetary Storm, was initially found in May 2019 as a malicious attack designed to target Windows machines. However, now the new variant, which Barracuda researchers first detected in late August, is now also targeting IoT devices, such as TVs that run on Android operating systems, and Linux-based machines, such as routers with ill-configured SSH service.
• This new variant gains access to machines by running a dictionary attack against SSH server, similar to FritzFrog, another peer-to-peer (p2p) malware. It can also gain entry by accessing open ADB (Android Debug Bridge) servers. The malware detects the CPU architecture and running OS of its victims, and it can run on ARM-based machines, an architecture that is quite common with routers and other IoT devices.

“While the botnet that this malware is building does not have clear functionality yet, it gives the campaign operators a backdoor into the infected devices so they can later be used for cryptomining, DDoS, or other large-scale attacks,” warned Murali Urs, Country Manager-India, Barracuda Networks.