Botnets coming soon to a smart home or automated building near you

At Hack in the Box (HITB) security conference in Amsterdam, Steffen Wendzel, head of Fraunhofer FKIE, presented “Alice’s Adventures in Smart Building Land – Novel Adventures in a Cyber Physical Environment”(pdf). This wasn’t “just” weaponizing your coffee pot. Brace yourself because Wendzel warned that a new class of botnet is coming. In fact, smart building botnets won’t be used for boring things like denial-of-service attacks or even refrigerators sending spam.