Black Hat Hacking in the IoT Era: Targeting Connected Devices

By ZedX

You love your gadgets, don’t you? Your smart thermostat that knows when you’re home. Your doorbell camera that lets you see who’s at the door from halfway across the world. Your voice-activated speaker that plays your favorite music on command. You’ve filled your home with a network of convenient, connected devices and you call it “smart.”

We call it a target-rich environment.

You see the Internet of Things (IoT) as a revolution in convenience. We see it as the single greatest expansion of the attack surface in the history of the internet. Every cheap, plastic-cased, internet-connected gadget you bring into your home is an unguarded door, a listening post, a digital soldier just waiting for a new commander. And we are always recruiting.

The Unseen Gold Rush: Why We Love IoT

For years, the game was about getting past firewalls and tricking users. It took effort. But the IoT era? It’s a gold rush. Manufacturers are in a frantic race to connect everything—from refrigerators to light bulbs to the internet. To win this race, they cut corners. And the first corner they always cut is security.

These devices are built to be cheap and easy to use. They are not built to be secure. They are shipped with laughable security flaws that a first-year script kiddie could exploit. For a seasoned black hat, it’s like the entire world decided to stop locking its doors.

The Holy Trinity of IoT Flaws

We don’t need sophisticated zero-day exploits to compromise most of your smart devices. We just need to take advantage of the same three lazy mistakes manufacturers and users make over and over again.

Hardcoded & Default Passwords: This is the original sin of IoT. Devices are shipped from the factory with a default administrator password like admin/admin or root/password. Users rarely change them. Many times, these credentials are “hardcoded,” meaning they can’t be changed even if you wanted to. We maintain massive lists of these default credentials, and our scanners are constantly sweeping the internet, testing millions of devices per hour. It’s less like hacking and more like walking down a street and checking which doors are unlocked.
Unpatchable Firmware: Your laptop gets security updates. Your phone gets security updates. Does your smart toaster? The firmware the core software that runs an IoT device—is riddled with vulnerabilities. Most manufacturers have no mechanism for pushing updates, and even if they did, you probably wouldn’t install them. This means a flaw discovered today will likely remain a permanent, exploitable entry point for the device’s entire lifespan.
No Encryption: The data sent between your smart device and the manufacturer’s server is often completely unencrypted. Your baby monitor’s video feed, the voice commands you give your smart speaker, the data on when you lock and unlock your smart door—it’s all flying through the air in plain text. A simple Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack on your Wi-Fi is all it takes for us to listen in on everything.

From Annoyance to Armageddon: The Power of an IoT Botnet

So, we’ve taken control of your smart camera or your digital thermostat. What’s the big deal? You think we want to watch you watch TV or mess with your air conditioning? That’s thinking small.

An individual compromised device is worthless. But a hundred thousand of them? A million? That is a supercomputer. That is a weapon. We use these compromised devices to create a botnet a vast army of zombie devices that we control from a central server.

With a botnet of this scale, we can:

Launch Devastating DDoS Attacks: Remember the Mirai botnet? It was built almost entirely from unsecured cameras and routers. It was powerful enough to take down major parts of the internet. By directing all our bots to send traffic to a single target, we can knock any website, company, or even government service offline. And we rent this power out to the highest bidder.
Mine Cryptocurrency: Your smart device has a processor. It’s not powerful, but when we harness the power of a million of them, we have a massive, distributed crypto-mining farm. We use your electricity and your hardware to make ourselves rich.
Create a Proxy Network: We can route our own malicious traffic through your infected devices, effectively hiding our true location. When law enforcement tries to trace the attack, the trail leads back to your smart fridge. Good luck explaining that.

Your Smart Home is Our Playhouse

The truth is, you’ve prioritized convenience over security at every turn. You’ve willingly bugged your own home with devices that have little to no protection, all managed by obscure companies with questionable security practices.

We’re not just at your digital doorstep anymore. You invited us inside. We’re on your network, listening to your conversations, watching your cameras, and using your devices to power our criminal enterprises. Your connected world is our playground, and we are just getting started.