Enlarge (credit: Michael Theis)
Security researchers have unearthed a sprawling list of login credentials that allows anyone on the Internet to take over home routers and more than 1,700 “Internet of things” devices and make them part of a destructive botnet.
The list of telnet-accessible devices, currently posted at this Pastebin address, was first posted in June, but it has been updated several times since then. It contains user names and passwords for 8,233 unique IP addresses, 2,174 of which were still running open telnet servers as of Friday morning, said Victor Gevers, chairman of the GDI Foundation, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that works to improve Internet security. Of those active telnet services, 1,774 remain accessible using the leaked credentials, Gevers said. In a testament to the poor state of IoT security, the 8,233 hosts use just 144 unique username-password pairs.
It is likely that criminals have been using the list for months as a means to infect large numbers of devices with malware that turns them into powerful denial-of-service platforms. Still, for most of its existence, the list remained largely unnoticed, with only some 700 views. That quickly changed Thursday with this Twitter post. By Friday afternoon, there were more than 13,300 views.