Nothing worse than having your heat shut off during cold winter months, yet that's what happened to residents of an apartment building in Finland. A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack over the internet, affected the automated system that controlled hot water, heat and more to the buildings, reported Motherboard.

The building's manager fixed the problem by disconnecting the system from the internet, then re-launching it. While most people think of DDoS attacks hitting large companies and city-wide infrastructures, as they're more widely used they could start impacting people at home, as the Finnish residents found. A virtual private network, or VPN, can help you hide your IP address, and route traffic, including a potential DDoS attack, to the VPN's IP address instead of yours.