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Is 2014 The Year Uncle Sam Takes On Connected Device Security?

The Consumer Electronics Show – or CES- kicked off last week in Las Vegas. In the last decade, CES has become one of the premiere venues for consumer device makers to launch new products and to show off prototypes of technology they hope to introduce to the public. Home entertainment megafauna dominate the coverage of CES — there was Samsung’s 85-inch LED LCD model with 4K resolution that can transform from flat-screen to curved display. But this year’s show is also a showcase for the next wave of connected devices, including wearable technology, smart appliances and connected vehicles. All these new platforms raise important questions about security, privacy and reliability. I sat down to talk about some of those issues with Mark Stanislav, the lead security evangelist at the firm Duo Security. Mark is a frequent contributor to The Security Ledger who last joined us to provide an end of year […]

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IoT Hackers Await Their Killer App

The next year will see the continued blurring of lines between the worlds of IT security and what we’ve come to think of as the ‘rest of our lives.’ But those who expect to see a large shift in malicious activity to the Internet of Things in 2014 will be disappointed.   That, according to a report from the security firm Trend Micro, which argues that Internet of Things malware and attacks are still a ways off – as cyber criminals await a “killer app” that will boost adoption and provide a common platform to attack. The prediction is part of “Blurring Boundaries,” a 2014 outlook report from Trend that argues IoT threats are mostly future-tech. “While we certainly think that attacks on IoT devices and the underlying architecture will be a major area of attack in the future, that future will not be until 2015 and beyond” writes Robert McArdle, […]

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Prediction: Rough Road Ahead in 2014 For Security and Internet of Things

With the New Year fast approaching, it’s (unofficially) ‘prediction season,’ when everyone worth their salt stares into the crystal ball and tries to imagine what the world will look like 12 months hence. To sort through our 2014 predictions, we called on Mark Stanislav, the chief Security Evangelist at Duo Security. Mark is a seasoned security researcher who has taken an interest in the security of the Internet of Things. Earlier this year, we wrote about research Mark did on the IZON Camera, an IP-enabled home surveillance camera that is sold by big-box retail stores like Best Buy, as well as by the Apple Store. Beneath the IZON’s polished exterior, the IZON was a mess of sloppy coding and poor security implementation, Stanislav discovered. Like many IoT devices, IZON cameras punted security to those responsible for the wireless network that it was deployed on – essentially trusting any connection from […]

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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. […]

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Thingful is a Facebook for Smart Devices

The data on exactly how many Internet of Things devices will be online by the end of the decade is a matter of debate. Cisco famously put the number at 50 billion by 2020, though Morgan Stanley thinks it could be as high as 75 billion. The analyst firm IDC estimates the number at 50 billion. But others have put the number lower. Gartner puts the number of connected things at around 30 billion by 2020. We might all be better off taking a cue from McDonald’s and just start using the phrase “billions and billions” by the end of the decade. As with McDonald’s hamburgers – the exact number doesn’t really matter, so long as everyone agrees that it’s going to be big. Really big. But all those devices – and the near-limitless IPV6 address space that will accommodate them – do present a management and governance problem: how […]

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