A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack.

Last week, Swiss news site Aargauer Zeitung published a story stating that an employee of cybersecurity firm Fortinet said 3 million electric toothbrushes had been infected with Java malware to conduct DDoS attacks against a Swiss company.

The story is dramatic and definitely newsworthy, if accurate, and began sweeping through other technology news sites yesterday, with numerous publications covering the alleged attack without verifying the story.