Security News > 2024 > February > No, 3 million electric toothbrushes were not used in a DDoS attack
A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack.
Last week, Swiss news site Aargauer Zeitung published a story stating that an employee of cybersecurity firm Fortinet said 3 million electric toothbrushes had been infected with Java malware to conduct DDoS attacks against a Swiss company.
There is one problem with the story-there is no record that this attack ever happened.
A DDoS attack is when an attacker sends enough requests or data at a website to overwhelm its resources or bandwidth so that it can no longer accept requests from legitimate visitors, effectively making the site unusable.
It is doubtful that 3 million electric toothbrushes would be exposed to the internet so that they could be infected with malware.
If it did, it would be a much bigger story than a DDoS attack.