Cold in Finland, IoT Cyber Attack
In late October 2016, the residents of 2 apartment buildings in the city of Lappeenranta in Finland found that the heat in the buildings were shut down. The reason for the failure wasn’t an accident — it was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack primarily using internet of things devices that lasted for several days.
The cyber criminals directed traffic to the computer system that controls the heating for the apartment buildings. The system belongs to a company called Valtia, which provides facility management services. Once this massive amount of traffic swamped the system, the computer was in a reboot loop, shutting down heat to the buildings Fortunately, network administrators were able to limit internet traffic to the targeted system, and residents got their heat back.
Source: HackerNews
