connected devices Archives

connected devices

AllSeen Alliance Announces Smart Lighting Framework

October 8, 2014 Paul Roberts

Smart lightbulbs aren’t anything new. In fact, products like the Philips Hue bulb have been in the market for years. The devices, which typically couple a standard incandescent or CF bulb with a wireless transmitter, allow lights to be managed via mobile device and also respond to environmental changes monitored by other sensors. But – as with much of the Internet of Things – each family of smart bulbs is something of an island: interacting- and communicating mostly with other smart home products from the same manufacturer. That’s good for the lightbulb maker, but bad for smart home advocates, see out-of-the box connectivity across product silos as a precursor to broad adoption of smart home technologies. It’s also been the case that the products that have been released have often fallen short in areas like security. In August, 2013, security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani disclosed a proof of concept hack […]

Tech and Telecoms Fight to dominate ‘Internet of Things’ – FT.com

October 7, 2014 Paul Roberts

The Financial Times has an interesting piece on the ongoing push and pull to develop cross-industry tech standards to govern the Internet of of Things. The article, by Daniel Thomas makes note of efforts by companies including Arm, Google and Vodafone to secure leading positions in the technology infrastructure that will provide connections to smart devices, even as firms like Apple and Google dominate the market for mobile devices and wearables that are at the vanguard of IoT. “The fragmentation and lack of technology standards could provide the biggest opportunity for telecoms operators in a fast-evolving industry already changing how people live,” says Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum tells FT. “There is a clear opportunity for an aggregator who is able to interconnect the myriad inoperable devices.” The article makes mention of the newly released ETSI specifications for Internet of Things (IoT) networks dedicated to low throughput communications. You can […]

New York City Phone Booths Add Beacons, Stoke Controversy

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

The web site Buzzfeed has a scoop today about a stealthy deployment of beacon technology in Manhattan that has some privacy experts concerned. According to the exclusive report, by Buzzfeed’s Joseph Bernstein and Jeremy Singer-Vine, Titan a media company that sells ad space in more than 5,000 phone kiosk panels in New York City’s five boroughs, has installed about 500 beacons on its ad panels. The company went forward with the deployment with the blessing of New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), but without any public input, Buzzfeed reported. Beacons are wireless devices that interact with mobile phones and other portable electronics. They’re used to provide location-specific data and interactions, such as advertisements linked to nearby businesses or to track the movements of an individual within a defined space (such as a show floor). In the case of the phone booth beacons, Titan and Sbordone, the company that provides the display […]

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

Unpatchable USB Malware Now Open Source | WIRED

October 2, 2014 Paul Roberts

Andy Greenberg over at Wired has an interesting piece of news coming out of last week’s Derbycon hacker conference in Louisville, Kentucky. According to Greenberg and Wired, researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson showed off their own version of Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell’s BadUSB malware, and that they’d released the code on Github. Their presentation raises the stakes for USB manufacturers to fix the BadUSB problem or leave hundreds of millions of users vulnerable, Greenberg writes. At a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings in August, Nohl and Lell, both of Security Research Labs (SRLabs), showed how the controller chips inside common USB devices can be reprogrammed, allowing USB peripherals to impersonate other kinds of devices. Among other things, Nohl demonstrated how a BadUSB infected device could emulate a USB keyboard, issuing commands to a connected machine using the permissions of the logged-in user. Alternatively, an infected USB could spoof a […]