I dont think there is a legal solution. The pragmatic solution is to own, then secure or disable your neighbor's insecure toaster.

This is an amazing problem. There is simply no solution because most people don't care!

There is a solution, and it's called "government" and "law". No, really. We've been dealing with people who don't care from the very dawn of civilization. There's a reason societies always end up creating governments and regulations, and it's precisely that reason.

Well, the owner of the Internet infrastructure could sue your neighbor. They'd learn to pay attention to that pretty quickly!

And they could sue the manufacturer, for selling them a device not fit for use? Exactly how much would each party sue the other for? The damage only takes place in aggregate, when hundreds of thousands of devices become part of a botnet.

Or, how about instead of drowning in lawsuit chains over pennies, we establish some basic rules about how commercial devices connected to the internet are allowed to behave.

That's how this problem is solved by every other industry that manufactures devices that are dangerous when used correctly. Software isn't a special snowflake.

The proposal was mostly tongue-in-cheek. That said, I'm not sure the problem is solved in other industries - there's been plenty of unsafe electrical devices being sold to western markets, for example. It's just hard to police this stuff.

Fine your neighbor, just as if he drove a shit unsafe car on the public roads and caused damage.

If the car was unsafe by design, the manufacturer would be fined.

Distribute your critical piece of infrastructure, blacklist IP addresses, etc.