Are you a fan of the brave little toaster, a story of household objects coming to life when not observed by humans? If you haven’t seen it, it is like Toy Story with toasters, reading lamps and radios. I think the time is right for a reboot.

In October of this year, there was a major DDOS attack that took a company called Dyn offline. Not many people have heard of Dyn but they use it without even realizing it. Dyn provides domain name services. This means in simple terms it is one of the address books of the Internet. Your device uses sites like Dyn to work out how to connect to the websites you want to visit. Without services like Dyn the Internet would be a lot less usable.

DDOS – distributed denial of services attacks, work by bombarding a site with so many requests that the site becomes unresponsive as it tries to cope with traffic levels it wasn’t designed to handle. If you’ve ever tried to buy an in-demand concert ticket online in the minutes after they have gone on sale you will understand the principle. DDOS is like this multiplied by a thousand, a million depending on the effectiveness of the attack.

The way these attacks have been organized in the past is that computers have been infected with a virus that allows someone to control large numbers of them. Each computer under control is called a bot (as in robot). The computer program controlling this attack coordinates them all to send requests at the same time. All these computers working together are called botnets.

When you visit a website your computer sends a request for the website to show you an individual page. When your infected computer is part of a DDOS attack it sends multiple requests per second so it acts like hundreds of computers in terms of normal traffic.

This has been happening for years but what made this latest attack interesting was the convergence of a couple of trends, the commercialization of botnets, and the Internet of Things.

The attack that took out Dyn was apparently carried out by someone who rented a botnet in order to pursue their own personal grudge. The botnet used is available to rent by anyone with several thousand dollars to spend.

The really interesting trend though is that as all our devices become internet-connected, they are being used instead of computers to carry out the attacks. The botnets are made up of your internet-connected fridge, toaster, light bulb. Due to the sheer number of internet-connected devices and the low level of security built into them so far, this creates a vast potential army of bots ready to be deployed.

This is where the brave little toaster comes in. When you are not using him, someone else might be. Perhaps the reboot could be a mash-up with Pinky and the Brain, probably the best cartoon ever made about a lab mouse trying to take over the world.