Heard a sysadmin say "default passwords are a hacker's welcome mat" and it made me rethink my whole home setup

I always figured my IoT light bulbs and smart plugs were too boring to target, but last week I checked my router logs and found 14 failed login attempts from random IPs in 3 days. Changed every default password that night, has anyone else found creepy stuff in their router logs?

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lisa_ross161mo ago

My neighbor's a network engineer and he told me something that nobody ever thinks about. Those old routers with default admin credentials, they're not just a risk for your home network. They're actually a stepping stone for attacks on other people too because hackers can use your smart devices to bounce attacks off of. I had a cheap security camera that was still using the factory password and it was literally sending traffic to a botnet server in Eastern Europe. Changed every single default password on everything from my thermostat to my coffee maker after that. The creepy part is that most people don't even realize their devices are phoning home to random servers while they're asleep.