In Bangladesh, like other parts around the globe, we use many substandard electronic consumer products like security cameras, smart watches, and Television boxes for their budget price. These devices, colloquially termed as ‘non-brand’ or ‘copy’ products pose a greater security risk that is almost invisible for a regular consumer. This threat is technically known as secret digital backdoors that cyber criminals often use to hide their identities during committing crimes in the cyberspace.
A recent technical investigation conducted by a Wall Street Journal journalist reveals that these vulnerabilities, particularly prevalent in budget products, allow external actors to hijack a home’s internet connection. This turns ordinary and harmless households into unwitting accomplices in massive, coordinated cyberattacks.
The Anatomy of a Hijack: The technical operation, known as “device jacking,” or device hijacking in plain English, operates on a highly automated lifecycle. Many of these backdoors are pre-installed at the factory level- with manufacturers reportedly embed the malware. Once connected to a home network with Wi-Fi or Ethernet, the compromised devices quietly dials out to intermediary servers operated by “Residential Proxy” companies. These entities monetize the infection by renting the hijacked IP addresses to paying customers. By routing traffic through a victim’s home network, malicious actors disguise their digital footprints, like our fingerprints, making their activities appear as legitimate residential web traffic. Telemetry data from compromised devices shows external controllers logging in every 10 to 30 minutes to maintain network dominance.
Red Flags on the Home Network: Tests conducted Comcast demonstrate immediate, high-risk network behavior after an infection occurs. Within minutes of activation, compromised devices trigger massive data surges. They quietly attempt to access private platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and Google Voice, while simultaneously routing outbound traffic to high-risk destinations, including cryptocurrency exchanges, gambling networks, and pornography portals.
Weaponizing the Smart Home: The proxy networks formed by these hijacked devices are weaponized for high-stakes criminal operations.
DDoS Attacks: By synchronizing millions of infected devices, even smart refrigerators, cyber criminals can flood and paralyze resilient global servers.
These botnets, a network of rouge internet devices controlled by cyber criminals, are responsible for some of the largest web outages, known as Distributed Denial of Service, ever recorded.
Financial Fraud: Disguised residential connections provide the perfect mask for bank fraud, ad fraud, and automated ticket scalping, where evading Internet Protocol address or IP address bans are critical.
Nation-State Cyber Warfare: Government-backed hacking groups increasingly use consumer endpoints as proxies to launch international cyberattacks, effectively using civilian homes as shields to mask their origins.
What we can do now?
No, we need not to trash or disconnect our devices right now. Readers with some beginner to intermediate technical expertise can monitor their home network with pi-hole, a tool that can block such types of malicious internet connections in a home network environment. This is easy to setup and maintain.
However, the author of this article also developed an automated solution that combines the power of Artificial Intelligence to assess the home network traffic and regularly send emails if there are any suspicious network activities that is related to cryptocurrency exchanges, gambling networks, and pornography portals.
The writer is a newsroom editor at Daily Observer online and an independent security researcher advocating for stronger digital governance and data privacy
