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 […]
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Google Will Use Cash To Clean Up Open Source
The widespread use of vulnerable or buggy third party code is serious problem facing public and private sector organizations, alike. Just this week, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported that an independent audit of Healthcare.gov, the star-crossed Federal Government website that is the primary health exchange in more than 30 states, is choking on poorly integrated or extraneous code that “served no purpose they could identify.” But what happens when the third-party code in question is open source code? Things get more complex. For one thing: open source is the salt and pepper of the software world: a common ingredient in applications of all sorts. And, as security researchers have noted: many of the so-called “smart devices” that are populating the physical world run variants of Linux, the open source operating system. But because those source code repositories are managed cooperatively and collectively by volunteers, security often takes a […]
At MIT Conference, Warnings of Big Data Fundamentalism
A senior Microsoft researcher issued a stern warning about the negative consequences of the current mania for data harvesting saying that a kind of “fundamentalism” was emerging regarding the utility of what’s been termed “Big Data” that could easily lead to a Orwellian future of ubiquitous surveillance and diminished freedom. Speaking to an audience of around 300 technology industry luminaries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Emerging Technology (EMTECH) conference, Kate Crawford, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Boston said that the technology industry’s fetish for “Big Data” had blinded it to the limits of analytics, and the privacy implications of wholesale data harvesting. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) annual Emerging Technologies (EMTECH) conference, a high-gloss event that throws entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and academics together to talk ‘big ideas’ on TED-inspired sets. Crawford’s speech, coming on the heels of a talk about transforming healthcare with big data […]
Health Exchanges Need A Fail Whale
In a blog post on Veracode’s blog today, I write about the problems encountered at government-run online health exchanges that were intended to connect millions to private insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The exchanges opened to the public on Tuesday, and they got off to a rocky start, with reports of web sites paralyzed as millions of uninsured Americans logged on to sign up for subsidized health insurance. In some cases, the problems appear to have been caused by “external factors.” New York State’s online health exchange was felled by the weight of more than 10 million requests of dubious origin, The New York Post reported. But other exchanges, including Healthcare.gov the federal government’s main health insurance storefront, which is used by residents or more than half of the states, were victims of their own success: overwhelmed when the doors swung open and millions of eager customers poured […]
FDA: Medical Device Makers, Hospitals Need To Boost Cyber Security
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued guidance to medical device makers and hospitals that use their products to pay more attention to cyber security and the potential for cyber attacks on vulnerable medical instruments. The FDA released its “Safety Communication for Cybersecurity for Medical Devices and Hospital Networks” on Thursday – the same day that the Department of Homeland Security’s ICS (Industrial Control System) CERT issued a warning about the discovery of hard coded “back door” passwords in some 300 medical devices from 40 separate vendors, including drug infusion pumps, ventilators and patient monitoring systems. The FDA said it expects device makers to “review their cybersecurity practices and policies to assure that appropriate safeguards are in place to prevent unauthorized access or modification to their medical devices or compromise of the security of the hospital network that may be connected to the device. Hospitals were instructed to harden […]
