On 2014 for the first time the IoT has been used as part of a cyber attack that sent out 75000 spam emails: over 100000 devices were hijacked by a bot attack between 23 December and 6 January.

Almost  25 per cent of the emails were sent from devices that weren't conventional computers or mobile devices, including multimedia centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator.

 It is the first documented case of common appliances being used in a cyber attack.

Most of the devices were not victim of a sophisticated attack but were very poorly protected and misconfigurated so consumers had virtually no way to detect or fix infections.

With a prediction of over 200 million devices connected by 2020 this attack demonstrates the key role of WISER project on raising awareness on cyber security and to apply best practices and guidelines both in organization and single user level.

Source: Cnet.com