Security News > 2024 > February > The unlikely 3 million electric toothbrush 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.
"The electric toothbrush is programmed with Java, and criminals have unnoticed installed malware on it - like on 3 million other toothbrushes," reads the article.
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.
Once a device is compromised, malware is installed to enlist it as part of their DDoS botnet and use it on attacks.
If it did, it would be a much bigger story than a DDoS attack.