There’s an interesting 2014 predictions blog post by AT&T’s Mobeen Khan that offers some thoughts on where the market for Machine-to-Machine (or M2M) technology is going in the next 12 months. According to Khan, an Executive Director of Marketing at AT&T Business, the M2M space is poised to take off in the next twelve months, as consumer demand for “smart” devices grows in both developed and developing markets, and as the M2M application stack matures, attracting the interest of developers. With M2M technology maturing, and the “Internet of Things” exiting its “gee whiz” phase, firms selling the technology no longer need to worry as much about justifying the return on investment for M2M and IoT technology. As that happens, however, security will become the most pressing issue in the M2M space, Khan believes. “To date, companies deploying M2M solutions have looked to ROI as the #1 need. As the need/ROI of […]
Conferences
A Christmas Hangover From Smart Devices
Editor’s note: This is reposted from Veracode’s blog. Just in time for the holidays, I received an e-mail by way of Electric Imp. If you’re not familiar with the “Imp,” (my phrase, not theirs), it’s a PaaS that makes it easy to build and connect smart devices. Among the cool gift ideas Electric Imp was promoting: a whole line of products produced by the company Quirky along with GE under the “Wink: Instantly Connected” products banner and available at Best Buy and other stores. There’s Egg Minder, an Internet-connected egg tray that tracks how many eggs you have left in your fridge, and how fresh each of them is. Not your thing? How about Nimbus? It’s a “customizable Internet-connected dashboard that lets you “track the data that affects your life, from commute times and weather to social media and more.” Nimbus looks like someone ripped the gauges out of a […]
Bosch Creates Internet of Things Business Unit
Robert Bosch GmbH, the world’s largest automotive supplier, said it has created a new business unit specifically to focus on so-called Internet of Things technologies. The company is launching a new division, Bosch Connected Devices and Solutions, that will manufacture a range of electronic products and software to connect remote devices. Among the innovations the new division will focus on are sensors and sensor-based applications for use in home and for transportation and logistics, according to a company press release. Bosch has put its weight behind the Internet of Things, using marketing muscle and checkbook to fund IoT research and popularize IoT technologies and the potential for connected devices to revolutionize industries from transportation to agriculture. In a press release, company CEO Volkmar Denner said in a press release that the company expects 6 billion “things” will be connected by 2015,” (though some estimates already put the number of connected devices […]
How Connected Consumer Devices Fail The Security Test
The Internet of Things leverages the same, basic infrastructure as the original Internet – making use of protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, Telnet and FTP. But the devices look and act very differently from traditional PCs, desktops and servers. Many IoT devices run embedded operating systems or variants of the open source Linux OS. And many are low-power and many are single function: designed to simply listen and observe their environment, then report that data to a central (cloud based repository). But IoT devices are still susceptible to hacking and other malicious attacks, including brute force attacks to crack user names and passwords, injection attacks, man in the middle attacks and other types of spoofing. Despite almost 20 years experience dealing with such threats in the context of PCs and traditional enterprise networks, however, too many connected devices that are sold to consumers lack even basic protections against such threats. […]
Experts: ‘Infinite’ Attack Surface of IoT Demands New Approach
If the growth of the Internet of Things has been a curiosity to enterprises and the IT security industry that serves them, it won’t stay that way for long, experts warned at a gathering in San Francisco. The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology is poised to transform the IT industry, vastly expanding the opportunities for cyber attacks against a much wider range of targets: from implantable medical devices to manufacturing plants to automobiles, according to participants in a panel discussion on “Shaping The Internet of Things” at The Amphion Forum event in San Francisco. While media attention on The Internet of Things has focused on products like the Nest Thermostat and connected automobiles, the IoT encompasses an almost limitless population of devices – many far more mundane, said Ralph Broom a Principal Engineer at the firm Noblis, and one of three panel members. The Internet of Things, in […]
