For anyone who frequently shops online, you may have noticed an increase in the number of electronic products sold by obscure, unheard of companies. Many of these products come with unbelievably, surprisingly affordable prices. A 4K projector with dual-band WiFi 6, 5G wireless, Bluetooth 5.2, and Android 13 for $54. What a deal. It almost feels too good to be true. How can a company afford to stay in business with prices like this. Surely their profit margin would have to be razor thin.
There is an old saying that goes, “if the product is free, you are the product.” The same idea applies to devices that are much cheaper than they should be. You have to ask yourself how this company is making a profit off of this. In many cases, the answer is data. Data aggregation is one of the fastest growing industries in the world today. The ability to understand exactly what a consumer wants or needs is an invaluable tool for any company selling products. Discovering the browsing habits of consumers, both private and corporate, is one of the most effective ways to determine this.
A GitHub user called jrm360seclab detailed a discovery he made on his home network through proactive threat hunting. He found that a projector he purchased on Amazon was generating DNS queries on a precise 65 second cycle. At a quick glance, the domain appeared to be o.facebook[.]com. The domain actually being queried was .o.fecebbbk[.]xyz, which is designed to look like .o.facebook[.]com. The same device was also sending traffic to an AWS IP address with no user interaction from the user. No IPS rule triggered an alert. The activity was only discovered through active monitoring and manually reviewing network traffic with enough pattern recognition to notice that a projector had no legitimate reason to query the same domain every 65 seconds.
This is the core value of threat hunting. It focuses on finding what automated systems miss. The infected projector is not an isolated case. It represents a broader trend where millions of consumer devices arrive already compromised, quietly turning home and corporate networks into unwitting infrastructure for cybercrime. These devices may operate in the background for months without raising obvious alarms, collecting data, beaconing out, or participating in malicious activity without the owner’s knowledge.
This highlights the importance of having strong monitoring and security controls in place. An MSSP such as DefendEdge helps organizations secure and monitor their networks beyond basic automated detection. Standard practices include network hardening, continuous monitoring, and active threat hunting to identify suspicious behavior that does not match known signatures. These measures help prevent incidents like this from going unnoticed and reduce the risk of compromised devices becoming a foothold for broader intrusion into the network.
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