Attacking and Defending Networked Embedded Devices

Currently, work on malware attack and defense focuses primarily on PCs. However, as lightweight computing devices with embedded operating systems become more ubiquitous, they present a new and very disturbing target for botnet developers; and as embedded devices become more integrated and networked with general-purpose computing, they can easily become the launching point for many attacks on the enterprise network in which the embedded devices are deployed. In this paper, the authors showcase a variety of practical attacks they were able to launch on an enterprise network using already widely deployed set-top-boxes.