Opinion

Are Wearables The Future Of Authentication?

CIO Magazine has an interesting round-up piece that looks at the enterprise impact of wearable technology, which you can read here.   Much of this is what you’d expect: FitBit, Google Glass and the (coming) tsunami of smart watches that will soon wash over us. The Cliff’s Notes version is that adoption of wearables will be rapid in verticals that are positioned to leverage the technology early on – such as healthcare and retail. But the piece argues that enterprises risk ‘missing’ the wearable wave in the same way that they ‘missed’ (or at least didn’t plan for) the mobile computing revolution. What might planning entail? Pilots, apparently – maybe of Google Glass or a competing technology. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of wearable technology. ] An interesting side note concerns a possible enterprise ‘killer app’ for wearables; authentication. The article quotes Forrester Analyst J.P. Gownders saying that wearable technology, with integrated biometric […]

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You Can Build An Open Source NEST Clone In One Day? Uh Oh!

I’ve been amazed at the herds of Johnny Come Lately’s who have glom’d onto the amazing Nest thermostat since Google purchased the company that makes it, Nest Labs, for a whopping $3.2 billion last week. Nest – and even its sister Protect smoke alarm – were hardly new, but that didn’t stop CNN from posting a ‘gee whiz’ video in the days that followed that had all the ‘we were here first’ excitement of a hand-held broadcast from the floor of CES. That – even though Nest is coming up on its third birthday and its cousin, the Protect, was released to considerable fanfare in October. The question for Google, of course, is ‘how is Nest really worth?’ I use one at my house, and I think it’s gorgeous and smart – but $3.2 billion? That’s why I was interested to check out this article over at Postscapes.com about an open source […]

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When The Internet of Things Attacks! Parsing The IoT Botnet Story

I spent most of last week at a conference in Florida going deep on the security of critical infrastructure – you know: the software that runs power plants and manufacturing lines. (More to come on that!) While there, the security firm Proofpoint released a statement saying that it had evidence that a spam botnet was using “Internet of Things” devices. The company said on January 16 that a spam campaign totaling 750,000 malicious emails originated with a botnet made up of “more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets” including home networking routers, multi media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator.” Proofpoint claims it is the “first time the industry has reported actual proof of such a cyber attack involving common appliances.” [Read: “Missing in action at Black Hat: the PC.”] Heady stuff – but is it true? It’s hard to know for sure. As with all these reports, it’s important […]

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Week In Security: More Target Woes and CES

It was another eventful week in security, with another big revelation in the story of a hack of box retailer Target Inc. That update – which accompanied Target’s fourth quarter earnings guidance – nearly doubled the number of known victims of that attack. It also revealed that credit card data was not the only information stolen by hackers, who also made off with customer names, mailing addresses and emails. In this latest installment of Security Ledger’s Security Week in Review, we spoke with Jody Brazil, the President of the security firm FireMon about the week’s events. Jody is a seasoned security professional who works day-in-day-out with companies that are trying to manage their risk. He said that even large companies like Target can fall victim to sophisticated attacks, but the IT security may be too quick to give up on traditional defensive technologies. Jody and I had an interesting chat about […]

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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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