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 bot net.

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 3 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 pre-installed 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 then only then

do the apps which allow you to view the pirated content show up as available for download.

And so Kim Wolf and these other botnets figured out that if you have one of these TV boxes

on your local network, they phone home to a proxy network.

And a proxy network is just basically using somebody else's computer or connection to

funnel your malicious activity. We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

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