Hacking an automated fish tank!

[mchambers]

Interesting Washington Post story. Think twice before you connect to the Internet of Things:

The hackers attempted to acquire data from a North American casino by using an Internet-connected fish tank, according to a report released Thursday by cybersecurity firm Darktrace.​

The fish tank had sensors connected to a PC that regulated the temperature, food and cleanliness of the tank.​

“Somebody got into the fish tank and used it to move around into other areas (of the network) and sent out data,” said Justin Fier, Darktrace’s director of cyber intelligence.
​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...chnology:homepage/card&utm_term=.30c4586f2476

 

[JLW]

I shared this on Batfish page earlier today, but I'll repeat the warning here. A lot of us have internet enabled equipment on aquaria, be it devices like the Apex-type thing in this article, or LED controllers, or fish cams. Not only can they become a point of entry into your network, but they can also be tampered with if not secured. I have seen several tanks where hackers got in and just started messing around to see what stuff did or whatever; potentially vital stuff sometimes gets altered, such as temperature regulation, dosing, etc., or just some jerk changing it so your lights flash at 2 AM.

I had a customer who had a hacker maliciously attack his tank. It had an autonomous water change on it, and someone shut off the leak detector and changed the calibration on it so that it would put in about 10x the water it took out . . . .

I know of someone else who set up a fish cam and a remote controlled feeder, so he could watch and feed his fish while on the road. He thought it was neat, shared the link on Facebook, it got shared by his friends... see where this is going? Went through a month's supply of fish food in a day because everyone was feeding the fish (although this is less hacky and more you're-a-moron-for-sharing-this-link!

So, change those passwords. Admin / Admin should not be your username and password. Change the ones on your router, while you're at it.

 

[mchambers]

There is a reason the IOT/Internet of Things is called by some the IOS.

 

[JLW]

Which is, interestingly enough, an appropriate acronym for another type of IOS....