There is no doubt about the Internet of things lowering down expenses and increasing the overall productivity of businesses these days. However, researchers claim about its challenges regarding the authenticity in maintaining data security and its high chances of breaches.
The judgment to this is proved to be right with the massive cyber-attack that happened to major websites such as Amazon, Twitter, and Spotify on 21st Oct 2016. Cybersecurity experts are yet not sure whether the reason behind this is IoT or something else.
The IoT boom has spurge companies to connect more and more devices without giving a second thought. According to a BI Intelligence report, there will be roughly 24 billion IoT devices connected to the internet by 2020.
The more adoption of devices, the more is the probability of explosion in vulnerabilities. Enterprises who already realize the issue have started implementing necessary measures. But as the device is considered to be a hardware, there would always be a scope for hackers.
Recent Cyberattacks that took place-
Def Con Security Conference
Hackers found nearly 50 critical issues in internet-connected door locks and solar panels, among other devices, in August.
Two Ethical Researchers
They were able to wirelessly take control of a Jeep Grand Cherokee, resulting in a recall of 1.4 million vehicles.
Denial-of-service attack
The attack took place over the website of journalist Brian Krebs. The massive influx of traffic leads to a great loss to its servers. This is really serious IoT-led attach more than it sounds.
The Wall Street Journal reported – “A large portion of the devices that were used in recent cyber attacks were cameras and digital video recorders made by a Chinese manufacturer”
We can see that more botnets will be used to hit enterprises. What steps can be taken to prevent this? The wise move is to implement critical infrastructure to the Amazon or Microsoft cloud. With this, the target gets distributed across many servers which can be misleading for cyber attackers.
Another idea is to go for “network profiling” for vulnerable devices within an enterprise. Let’s hope that these ideas can be a pillar for IoT in the coming time.
