IOT- A Trillion Points of Vulnerability
6 years ago

The vision of internet of things is to make lives more convenient and businesses more efficient. The growth is so rapid that analyst Gartner predicts, by 2020 the number of devices connected to internet of things will go as high as 26 billion, excluding PCs, smart phones and tablets. Cisco predicts IoT will amount to $4.6 trillion for Public sector alone.


These are of course exciting times for those riding the high tide of IoT technology. Hence, in the corridors of IoT you can hear murmurs and whispers of how it will revolutionize the life as we see it today. However, one important point that needs some loud discussion, more urgently than ever, is trust, security, and privacy of data. 

 

With each device getting ‘wired’ to IoT we’re creating a new vulnerability point. The Altman Vilandrie & company, conducted a study in April 2017 and the results were startling, if not alarming. Nearly half of the companies using internet of things devices faced cyber security threats and breaches, amounting to more than $20 million in revenue loss. 

 

This leads us to one question. How confident can organizations be of confidentiality of the data collected and the integrity of the data sent through their IoT enabled devices? When analyzing their data organizations can’t be sure that their data has not been interfered or compromised with. One such example is smart meters used in Spain. Now these can be easily hacked to under-report energy consumption!

 

Mulling over the thought above, leads us to the following list of security threats an IoT device could possibly face

 

  • Denial of service (complete or distributed)
  • Malware (similar to Wannacry)
  • Passive wiretapping (compromising data)
  • Structured query language injection 
  • War-driving (search for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle)
  • Zero-day exploits (software tool that attacks a flaw in a computer system with no opportunity for detection).
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