A flood attack has been popular among hackers for years. It’s a kind of attack to take down a website by raising false traffic. Usually, such action is done through a malware on an infected PCs. (We could have seen it in the top movies like Transformers and Die hard 4). The new type of this attack has been detached by two security companies: Internet-connected printers, home routers and sometimes webcams are used to knock targeted sites offline.

Recently, Chinese security company NSFocus in its report announced that the amount of networked home and office devices in hackers’ attacks has increased to 30 %. NSFocus gets the information from its hardware sold to large firms aiming to defend against denial-of-service attacks. The control over routers has been taken using malware that looked for devices with default passwords.

The company has found another way to take a router or a printer under control with no need of a malware. There is a communication protocol called SSDP, which many devices use to check in with its owner or operator. The protocol is designed so that it could ask a device to send information to a different server. That feature can be used during an attack by directing many devices to repeatedly send information to a server of a certain website.

According to specialists, the use of home devices could become more common for these purposes, but individual users shouldn’t be much worried, because such attacks usually appear to gain money.