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Could your innocent-looking router or TV box actually be part of a botnet?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Routers, computers, web cameras, they all connect to the internet, and they can be infected

with malicious software that lets someone else, not the device's rightful owner, take over.

The device becomes a bot essentially, and a group of these devices networked together

becomes a botnet.

These botnets can then be used for nefarious purposes, like distributed denial of service attacks without the device owners even knowing about it.

Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs recently wrote about several large botnets, including

one called Kim Wolf, that compromised more than three million devices.

They're mainly compromising not just routers, but TV boxes. They advertise the ability to

view dozens or hundreds of streaming services that cost money for free, for a one-time fee.

And they tend to come

installed, pre-installed with malicious software and things that turn your system into a bot.

And just to make sure I understand, is it that the TV boxes have the botnet already in it,

or that people are installing some kind of software where the botnet is involved?

So they either come preinstalled or it comes out of the box with Android's operating system

and everything set up. But in order to use it for that streaming services, you have to agree

to download an entire new app store and

...