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by Jtsummers 3530 days ago
Speaking as not-me, the average, non-technical homeowner who just installed his new internet connected washing machine at home.

Great, now I can throw in a load and get a notice on my phone when it's done. This is awesome! (3 hours later) Wait, why can't I get to the internet? I call my ISP, they tell me that my connection is fine (it's tech support, they aren't security experts). But, I tell them, Google doesn't work for me. They do some tests, everything should work. I bitch, moan, cry a little, rage quite my ISP and sign up with someone new. It works for a few days until my washing machine (having been offline for a bit) gets exploited again.

I still don't have a clue as to why I'm being blocked from Google and company. Maybe they kick back a message as a 4xx (what would be appropriate?) that says my network has been hacked. But I've seen those sorts of things all the time in ads, I know that's just someone trying to scam me, convince me to run something that'll install a virus on my computer.

Must be my computer! Damn Dell piece of shit. I can't afford a new one. Maybe that neighbor kid can come over again and help me out with this.

($200 and several trips for the neighbor kid later it's still not solved)

3 comments

From my point of view as someone who is no longer ddos'd, I don't have a problem with this.
Wait, isn't this whole plan a massively worse DDoS than what we experienced today?

By exploiting a toaster, the attacker could shut off the domestic internet service entirely, rather than just disrupting Netflix.

As you said, some sort of message would have to be the way. A 4xx probably won't cut it but something like the messages Google shows you when asking for a captcha is fine.

My point is that there will be a cost, and that taking action against vendors won't be enough (sp. if they are in a different country, are no longer in business, etc.)

> Maybe they kick back a message as a 4xx (what would be appropriate?) that says my network has been hacked

429 seems appropriate.

Or maybe even 451.