hacking

If so, you could be unwittingly turning your internet-connected "smart" home into a weapon of web destruction.

That's the unsettling conclusion to be drawn from the recent web attacks that made use of a botnet army of compromised connected devices, from webcams to printers, to knock out a number of popular websites.

The smart home, it seems, is pretty dumb when it comes to security.

Recurrent attacks up to 3 November flooded the cable link with data, making net access intermittent.

Researchers said the attacks showed hackers trying different ways to use massive networks of hijacked machines to overwhelm high-value targets.

Experts said Liberia was attacked by the same group that caused web-wide disruption on 21 October.

Those attacks were among the biggest ever seen and made it hard to reach big web firms such as Twitter, Spotify and Reddit.

Short bursts

They are not just hacking your email and online banking accounts anymore.

Computer viruses do not distinguish between a personal computer or a hospital machine delivering therapy to patients — and the results could prove deadly.

Cyber attacks on hospitals have emerged as a significant cyber security risk in 2016, which not only threaten highly sensitive information but also potentially harm the very lives of those being protected.

Dyn, an Internet middleman company, was the target of the distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack that hit in three waves. Dyn directs traffic when people type a URL into a browser. So the attack on the company caused temporary outages at many of the internet's most widely-trafficked sites.

Verizon Communications agreed to buy Yahoo for $4.8bn (£4bn), but disclosure of a huge data breach put a question mark over the deal.

In the quarter to 30 September, Yahoo's profits rose to $163m, from $76.3m last year, on revenue up 6.5% to $1.3bn.

Chief executive Marissa Mayer said the figures underlined Yahoo's value.

"We remain very confident, not only in the value of our business, but also in the value Yahoo products bring to our users' lives," she said in a statement.

The code has been injected into the sites by cyberthieves, said Dutch developer Willem De Groot.

He found the 5,925 compromised sites by scanning for the specific signature of the data-stealing code in website software.

Some of the stolen data was sent to servers based in Russia, he said.

Costly mistake

The report provides new details on the 2015 attack on the BoM, which owns one of Australia's largest supercomputers.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp previously quoted officials blaming China for the hack, which China denied.

The weather bureau produces scientific research information which is valuable to other countries.

Mr Podesta also suggested Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign was given advance notice of the breach.

His remarks come after WikiLeaks published a trove of his hacked emails.

The top adviser to Mrs Clinton said the enquiry was part of a wider probe into hacks on the Democratic Party by groups with Russian ties.

"I've been involved in politics for nearly five decades," Mr Podesta told reporters aboard the Clinton campaign plane.

The response will be "proportional," press secretary Josh Earnest said, without elaborating. He said the actions would likely not be announced ahead of time and could never be made public.

Speaking with reporters on Air Force One, Earnest said a "range" of responses were on the table.

Last Friday's announcement was the first time the government has publicly blamed another country for hacking with the goal of influencing a US election.

The 24-year-old IT analyst has admitted the crime, said police, for which he could face up to six years in jail.

Motorists were left in shock last week when footage from a Japanese porn film was displayed on an electronic screen in south Jakarta.

The video ran for five minutes on Friday before power was eventually cut.

However the clip had already been captured on many mobile phones and soon spread across social media.

The man, who was arrested in his office, allegedly carried out the prank after seeing login details displayed on the billboard.