The residents of two apartment buildings in the city of Lappeenranta in Finland found themselves bundling up at home when the heat in the buildings shut down. The reason for the failure wasn’t an accident — it was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack primarily using internet of things devices that lasted for several days. It’s the latest in a string of attacks that have leveraged the internet of things to overwhelm systems. In this most recent case, the hackers directed traffic to the computer system that controls the heating (including the hot water heaters) for the apartment buildings. The system belongs to a company called Valtia, which provides facility management services. Once this massive amount of traffic swamped the system, the computer attempted to reboot itself. This caught the computer in a reboot loop, shutting down heat to the buildings and confounding the maintenance staff. Fortunately, network administrators were able to limit internet traffic to the targeted system, and residents got their heat back.
