nications as well as details of HBGary’s customers. This led to the resignation of Barr and the
closure of HBGary Federal.
Hacktivist activity is often centered on disrupting businesses and targeting individuals to
gain media coverage and public attention. As such, IoT devices installed in the workplace and
at home will be lucrative targets for these threat agents. Homes of specific individuals will be
targeted to compromise physical safety by abusing potential vulnerabilities in connected door
locks and lighting systems. IoT devices such as baby monitors and smart TVs are also likely to
be targeted to obtain and leak confidential information. Both consumers and designers of con-
nected devices need to think through risks posed by hacktivists to make sure the proper secu-
rity controls are engineered and configured.
Vandals
Vandals have been the best-known group of threat agents since the dawn of the Internet. They
aren’t interested in financial gain. Their primary objective is simply to prove that a system can
be compromised, and they often like to take credit for demonstrating it. Even though their
intention is not to cause harm beyond obtaining a brief moment of fame, the outcomes of
their actions often do cost individuals and corporations money and result in distress and loss
of reputation.
In April 2015, the website of Tesla Motors was vandalized to display the content shown in
Figure 7-28 (courtesy of Reddit).
FIGURE 7-28. Tesla Motors website compromised by vandals
The vandals also were able to compromise Tesla’s Twitter account and posted inappropri-
ate tweets, including some promising free cars (Figure 7-29).
222 CHAPTER 7: SECURE PROTOTYPING—LITTLEBITS AND CLOUDBIT