LAS VEGAS – While gadget makers see IoT devices powering our future, security experts view the potential pitfalls from all those connected gadgets as more of a sleeping giant. And watch out when it wakes up.
It’s the dark side of connected devices that nobody wants to talk about during a week when the consumer electronics industry beats the drum about smart homes, connected cars and everything else. Hackers often go after the weak link of a security chain, and the attacks over the past year have increasingly shown that it’s internet-of-things devices with questionable defenses that make for easy targets.
It’s not like the public doesn’t understand. While consumers see the benefit of connected devices, only about one in 10 people said they fully trust the gadgets to keep them secure, according to a survey from Cisco.
What they may not grasp is the sheer flood of products coming to the market. In 2017, there were 8.4 billion connected devices. The volume is expected to hit 20.4 billion by 2020, according to analyst firm Gartner. The defensive capabilities of these devices will vary greatly.
“It’s hard to evaluate the security of a camera, or a doorbell, or something you put in an industrial machine,” said Michael Kaiser, the executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance. “The surface is growing quickly and I think people are concerned.”
Hackers have known about IoT devices’ weak defenses for a while, taking control of single-purpose gadgets like cameras and DVRs around the world to create botnets, a vast army of devices they can use to launch attacks online. In October, for instance, researchers at Netlab 360 discovered the IoT_reaper botnet, which was hijacking more than 10,000 devices a day.
Corero Network Security estimated that companies get hit with eight attempted distributed denial-of-service attacks a day, a phenomenon it attributed to the growing number of unsecured IoT devices.
Weak IoT devices are what led to a massive internet outage in 2016, when the Mirai botnet — using thousands of hacked DVRs and webcams — assaulted servers in New Hampshire. Hacking IoT devices was even a major plot point in the latest season of HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” (Spoilers ahead!)
To read the rest of this fascinating article, click on CNET
