Internet Hacking and Weather stations

[Chet]

Many have heard of the DEnial of service attacks on Dyn using various internet connected devices such as home monitors. I have been thinking about this and my weather station. My weather station sends data via wifi to the Davis data logger which is connected to my iMac. Weathercat pulls the data and sends it to six web sites. Pretty standard for most of us. Is this kind of hijacking of devices possible for our WeatherStation connectivity?

[wvdkuil]

It should be no problem for the weather-station as normally they do not accept incoming connections and/or do not upload directly to the internet.
The WL-ip logger uploads directly but only accept "local area connections" for its web-interface.

Devices/weatherstations like netatmo upload their data to a database and the app on your phone retrieves its info from that database.  No incoming connection to the app.

WeatherCat same situation. As long as your Mac is secure and not accepting incoming connections from the internet, there should be nothing to worry.

All those devices in the latest DDOS attacks had a "smart phone app" with direct connections. So you can change your thermostat at home when being in the office. Fine, but it should work  with a new password you set yourself, not the default one.
Same with your internet-router. No setup from the internet needed, you can do that at home. So disable all those "maybe it can ben handy some day" features.
The smart-tv's are the real weak devices. They are wide open to the internet and nearly always with the default passwords. And they accept updates for their software.  Any junior hacker with such a TV can write software for those "smart-TV's with stupid not-protected standard software".

Wim

[elagache]

Dear Chet, Wim, and WeatherCat good netizens,

Thanks for your thoughtful summary Wim.  You put the situation into clear focus.  There is only one additional piece of information that might also put our mind at ease.  At least some of the attacks where launched from emails with Trojan horse applications attached to them.  According to reports, these Trojan horses would then scan the home network for devices to exploit.  Such applications are clearly PC specific.

Mac users should definitely not rest on their laurels but a lot of ill is being done thanks to sloppy implementation of Microsoft and related software.  Sadly, I fear that even Mac users are suffering an unjustified burden.  Thanks the ease of exploiting windows applications and the associated maintenance headaches, people are fleeing personal computers in droves hoping to live safely in a world of mobile devices.  Alas, such safety is most likely illusory.  Nonetheless, in the meantime, I'm sure that former PC users are viewing Macs with an unreasonable suspicion of harboring the same ills as their PC analogues.

Cheers, Edouard

[Blicj11]

Thanks for taking the time to explain it Wim and Edouard.

[Felix]

An understandable Ars Tech article explaining last week's Dyn DDoS attack.


http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/inside-the-machine-uprising-how-cameras-dvrs-took-down-parts-of-the-internet/

[Felix]

BTW, my Chinese-made cameras don't have hard-wired admin access but I changed/beefed up the passwords anyway last Friday.

[elagache]

Dear Felix and WeatherCat Netizens,

An understandable Ars Tech article explaining last week's Dyn DDoS attack.

Thanks for the post.  It is an interesting read.  I'll have you know that I didn't contribute any cameras to this attack - since I don't have any IP cameras.    I do have a new printer that appears to access the internet on its own.  I'll have to see if there is some silly default password nonsense on that.

Remember when using the Internet at least appeared to be safe? 

Edouard