The Attack of the Killer Vending Machines
A.I. Vending Machines Protest Human Intervention
A not-so-fun fact about the year 1995 is that 37 Americans were killed by vending machines falling over onto them.
Maybe this number would be reduced if machines would finally accept bills that are slightly wrinkled. Aside from the
contents of the machine and that consuming them could kill you slowly over time, the most common way people are
killed by vending machine is that the machine falls on them, typically when a person is rocking the machine trying
to get out the snack they just paid for.
Whether surfing the wave or the web, your odds of being killed by either a vending machine or a shark are about even.
When AI takes over our algorithms...
In 2017, a school was attacked by its own soft drink vending machines snacking on your data
A DDoS attack using a campus' own vending machines, light bulb lighting system and assorted Internet of Things (IoT) devices to carry out a botnet attack.
Connected vending machines are part of the Internet of Things, which you may have heard of. A university found that its internet was choking and stuttering. An investigation showed the on-campus vending machines were waging a quiet war, alternately throttling and completely shutting down the connection. The infected soda machines and 5,000 other botnet-infected IoT devices were making hundreds of DNS lookups every 15 minutes.
"This botnet spread from device to device by brute forcing default and weak passwords. Once the password was known, the malware had full control of the device and would check in with command infrastructure for updates and change the device's password-locking us out of the 5,000 systems."
According to the tech who discovered their uni's soda machines had gone rogue, the botnet was hungry. It spent days and an untold amount of bandwidth phishing for yummy "fish" dinners. They said in the report, "The name servers, responsible for Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups, were producing high-volume alerts and showed an abnormal number of sub-domains related to seafood."
https://www.engadget.com/2017-02-17-when-vending-machines-attack.html
We're now lower on the food chain than the robots.
Illustration by D. Thomas Magee for Engadget
dr. π (pi)
.
A not-so-fun fact about the year 1995 is that 37 Americans were killed by vending machines falling over onto them.
Maybe this number would be reduced if machines would finally accept bills that are slightly wrinkled. Aside from the
contents of the machine and that consuming them could kill you slowly over time, the most common way people are
killed by vending machine is that the machine falls on them, typically when a person is rocking the machine trying
to get out the snack they just paid for.
Whether surfing the wave or the web, your odds of being killed by either a vending machine or a shark are about even.
When AI takes over our algorithms...
In 2017, a school was attacked by its own soft drink vending machines snacking on your data
A DDoS attack using a campus' own vending machines, light bulb lighting system and assorted Internet of Things (IoT) devices to carry out a botnet attack.
Connected vending machines are part of the Internet of Things, which you may have heard of. A university found that its internet was choking and stuttering. An investigation showed the on-campus vending machines were waging a quiet war, alternately throttling and completely shutting down the connection. The infected soda machines and 5,000 other botnet-infected IoT devices were making hundreds of DNS lookups every 15 minutes.
"This botnet spread from device to device by brute forcing default and weak passwords. Once the password was known, the malware had full control of the device and would check in with command infrastructure for updates and change the device's password-locking us out of the 5,000 systems."
According to the tech who discovered their uni's soda machines had gone rogue, the botnet was hungry. It spent days and an untold amount of bandwidth phishing for yummy "fish" dinners. They said in the report, "The name servers, responsible for Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups, were producing high-volume alerts and showed an abnormal number of sub-domains related to seafood."
https://www.engadget.com/2017-02-17-when-vending-machines-attack.html
We're now lower on the food chain than the robots.
Illustration by D. Thomas Magee for Engadget
dr. π (pi)
.