Kevin Beaumont is not exactly a random person in this instance, he's a pretty experienced writer on cybersecurity.

He elaborates farther down the thread:

> A botnet of 3 million toothbrushes would be twice the size on Mirai's various botnets put together, and a MAJOR infosec event. The person they were interviewing has only worked there about a year, and Fortigate staff don't appear to know about this botnet.

Edit to add:

Imagine you read on TechMeme that room-temperature superconductors are now confirmed to exist. But when you trace the story back, the original citation is an article in the Tucson Regional Business Journal about how scientific research benefits innovation. Would you think "wow, big scoop for the TRBJ!" Or something more like, "I bet that business reporter misunderstood something they heard."

Reminds me of the "Jick Study" that Dopesick talks about[0].

This was a simple letter to the editor, written by a doctor, that became the driving force behind Oxycontin marketing.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/nejm-lett...

Or, similarly, the letter to the editor in NEJM which caused decades of mistrust of MSG -- and which, depending on who you listen to, might or might not have been a deliberate hoax.

https://news.colgate.edu/magazine/2019/02/06/the-strange-cas...

I believe the Mastodon OP mistranslated the German article, which states:

> Das Beispiel, das wie ein Hollywood-Szenario daherkommt, hat sich wirklich so zugetragen.

Correct translation:

> This example, which seems like a Hollywood scenario, actually happened.

But as you can see, if you miss the last part, it's easy to get the translation wrong.

(Interestingly, the Swiss article doesn't directly quote Fortinet as a source, but as an expert opinion. Maybe something was lost in translation there when the story went viral?)

I think OP wants to say that the only source for such a massive bot net is a tiny newspaper article.

Million dollar damage because a Swiss site wasn't reachable for 4 hours?

I doubt that.

It's Switzerland. Maybe it was a watch website that could sell a few 100k watches...

The claim being made is ludicrous, doesn't hold up to scrutiny or common sense, and the amount of details given is sparse enough to cause disbelief.

If this is real, the article is beyond useless in informing people of what has happened and how it's happened.

I use a couple of TP-Link smart power plugs and one of them occasionally wants to access the internet to get the time from an NTP server. Since I block all their internet access this one goes crazy and brings my DNS server (custom written in Python) down to a halt. Just blocking him in the firewall of the AP would probably also not make him behave and he'd still pollute the RF spectrum. Happens rarely, though. Kicking him off of the WiFi and letting him reconnect makes him behave again.

This is the most anthropomorphically abusive and hilariously accurate comment I've read in awhile.

Funnily enough that happens also when you run the original article through Google translate:

> She's in the bathroom at home, but she's part of a large-scale cyber attack. The electric toothbrush is programmed with Java, and criminals have unnoticed installed malware on it - like on 3 million other toothbrushes.

(In German, toothbrushes are female, like all brushes.)

So the claim is the women started talking and wouldn't be quiet? "Nevertheless, she persisted"

If he were a good boy, he would listen to what is told to him by the DHCP server and use the local NTP server instead (not only is it closer but it's also fed by PPS-accurate GPS data).

German, like many other European languages, uses gendered nouns and refers to nouns with gendered pronouns.

It means nothing other than that you need to remember the correct pronoun for every noun, which is absurd.

I didn't even consider that parent might come from a gendered language background! Lack of insight on my part.

I just assumed they were gendering inanimate objects, which even non-gendered English speakers will do, but conveys more anthropomorphic intent.

> This is the most anthropomorphically abusive and hilariously accurate comment I've read in awhile.

Let's coin a term for this: misanthromorphism.

The article claims a million dollar damage because the site of Swiss company wasn't reachable for 4 hours.

Highly unlikely.

Your are missing the part that Fortinet didn't publish the attack themselves but choose a non technical news paper.

Highly suspicious and now confirmed it didn't happen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300373