A university was attacked by its lightbulbs and lamp posts

It sounds like a sci-fi movie. Over 5,000 connected devices, including light bulbs and vending machines, were hacked to slow internet service at a university to a crawl. Poorly secured internet of things (IoT) devices have become gold mines for hackers looking to launch DDoS attacks to take websites and services offline. But this latest case, detailed in Verizon's Data Breach Digest 2017, is the rare example of gadgets attacking their own network. The devices were making hundreds of Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups every 15 minutes, causing the university's network connectivity to become unbearably slow or even inaccessible.