The New York Times Building

The New York Times: Internet of Things Security a Challenge to Civilization

The New York Times Building
The New York Times is reporting this week on the “challenge to civilization” posed by insecure, connected devices.

In-brief: Steve Lohr at The New York Times had an interesting piece on security for the Internet of Things this week, noting that Internet of Things security poses a challenge to civilization.

Steve Lohr at The New York Times had an interesting piece on security for the Internet of Things this week, which I’ve linked to. From the article:

The optimistic outlook is that the internet of things will be an enabling technology that will help make the people and physical systems of the world — health care, food production, transportation, energy consumption — smarter and more efficient.

The pessimistic outlook? Hackers will have something else to hack. And consumers accustomed to adding security tools to their computers and phones should expect to adopt similar precautions with internet-connected home appliances.

“If we want to put networked technologies into more and more things, we also have to find a way to make them safer,” said Michael Walker, a program manager and computer security expert at the Pentagon’s advanced research arm. “It’s a challenge for civilization.”

Lohr mentions a couple of data points to bolster this argument: the appearance of the Mirai botnet, for one, and Akamai’s report on SSHowDown, a common SSH flaw that has been harnessed to assemble large scale botnets of “things.”

Check out the full article here: Stepping Up Security for an Internet-of-Things World – The New York Times

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