Toothbrush botnet crashes Swiss firm--maybe

If you had "WiFi toothbrush botnet" on your bingo card for 2024, put an X in that box.

In a story that has now been updated a couple of times, supposedly 3 million WiFi enabled toothbrushes were hacked and assembled into a botnet that used a DDOS attack to bring down a Swiss firm's IT infrastructure. At least, that was the initial story. This article has now been updated to indicate that there was a translation error from German, and the toothbrush botnet was posed as a hypothetical possibility, and not as something that actually happened.

But even as a hypothetical, it's an interesting idea, and highlights the dangers of filling our homes with Internet-enabled devices with poor or no cybersecurity. Somehow, humanity survived for millennia without IP-enabled devices in our homes, and now we need to have a toothbrush that tells us when to brush our teeth? A pessimist might say we are doomed as a species.