Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, February 7, 2024 edition of the Sanchez and its Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Jan has a good reminder today that the first mention of the term computer virus in an academic paper happened about 40 years ago.

The paper was published in February of 1984 and the title was computer viruses, theory, and

experiments. It does outline the basic form of a computer virus. Now, the way a computer

virus is really defined in this paper is as something that infects executables. And a lot of

the early Malavir really acted that way where it sort of appended itself to existing executables

on a system. And then whenever that normally benign executable was executed, the malicious

code was executed as well. This type of computer virus has become more rare these days, not really seen that much anymore,

but the term computer virus, as Jan points out, has really been used sometimes to just describe

malware. And just to show what malware or viruses look like these days, an article in Argaard's site on which is a Swiss

newspaper is talking about an army of infected toothbrushes that apparently did hit a company in

Switzerland. The data appears to come from Fortinet,

but I couldn't find an original article at Fortinets and blog post or so talking about this.

I'll link to a copy of the story at Tom's Hardware,

which, first of all, is in English,

and also the original newspaper is behind a paywall.

But apparently what happened was that for unknown reasons, these toothbrushes, which run Java, got infected and were abused as a simple DDoS botnet, where all of these toothbrushes were asked to request a particular

website of a Swiss company. Having 3 million infected toothbrushes at their disposal, of course,

the attackers were successful in shutting down the affected website for some time, causing apparently substantial damage.

So there are some missing details here, not 100% sure how accurate the reporting is,

but this is in line with what we sort of have seen from Internet of Thing style attacks,

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