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Update: Facebook awards $50K Internet Defense Prize for Work on Securing Web Apps

Saying that research dollars for cyber security are disproportionately devoted to work on “offensive” techniques (like hacking), social media giant Facebook has awarded two researchers  a $50,000 prize for their work on cyber defense. The company announced on Wednesday that Johannes Dahse and Thorsten Holz, both of Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany for their work on a method for making software less prone to being hacked. The two developed a method for detecting so-called “second-order” vulnerabilities in Web applications using automated static code analysis. Their paper (PDF here) was presented at the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. In a blog post announcing the prize, John Flyn, a security engineering manager at Facebook, said the Internet Defense Prize recognizes “superior quality research that combines a working prototype with significant contributions to the security of the Internet—particularly in the areas of protection and defense.” Dahse and Holz’s work was chosen by a panel […]

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Is HyperCat An IoT Silo Buster? | ZDNet

Steve Ranger over at ZDNet has an interesting write-up on HyperCat, a UK-funded data sharing open specification for Internet of Things devices. The new specifications has the backing (or at least interest) of major players and could become an alternative to proprietary standards such as Apple’s HomeKit or Google Nest. HyperCat is described as an “open, lightweight, JSON-based hypermedia catalogue” that is designed to “expose information about IoT assets over the web.” The goal is to provide a set of open APIs and data formats that startups and other smaller firms can use to built ecosystems of connected objects. Smart devices are typically developed using common technologies and platforms: RESTful APIs, JSON (Javascript Object Notation) for data formatting and HTTP (or secure HTTP) as the main communications protocol. However, the Internet of Things is badly “silo’d” – meaning that interoperability between IoT devices happens only when those smart devices happen to use the […]

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The Week in Data Breach: Pizza And Chinese Food

The news over the weekend was about more data breaches affecting chain restaurants. First, there are reports that the pizza chain Domino’s appears to have been hacked. The news came by way of an online post on Friday by a group claiming to have compromised servers used by Domino’s to store data on customers in France and Belgium. (Cached version of the announcement can be viewed here.) The group claims to have made off with information including the user name and password for 592,000 French customers and over 58,000 records from Belgian customers. It has asked Domino’s for payment of €30,000 in exchange for the data. The company has acknowledged the attack, but claims no customer financial data was stolen. In other news, the Chinese restaurant chain PF Chang’s acknowledged on Thursday that it was, indeed, the victim of a successful cyber attack that a breach last week that resulted […]

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Internet of Things Interactions

IoT And Big Data To Create Insurance Industry Winners, Losers

This blog writes a lot about risk and the Internet of Things. Specifically: we talk about how smart, sensor rich, connected devices create all kinds of new risks for enterprises and consumers. It goes without saying that feature development (and adoption) are running well ahead of pesky issues like secure design and deployment or data privacy. Smart companies are trying to put some brakes on that trend. (Witness Google prohibiting sensitive health data from its Android Wear platform.) But, by and large, companies are plowing ahead into IoT technologies without a lot of consideration of the risks. But there’s one industry where risk _is_ the business: the insurance industry. And there, the thinking about the potential of Internet of Things is decidedly bullish. In fact, a recent report from the financial services research firm Celent (paywall) suggests that broad adoption of IoT technologies will revolutionize the way insurance companies market and sell to […]

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Cisco Combines Linux, IOS For Internet of Things

Networking equipment giant Cisco Systems said that it is combining elements of the open source Linux operating system to its IOS firmware, launching a new architecture it calls “IOx” that will connect the billions of intelligent devices that will make up the Internet of Things. The new architecture was announced at Distributech in San Antonio – a trade show for the utility industry, on Wednesday. The company said IOx will make it easier for its customers to connect Internet of Things devices to back-end resources and the larger Internet.  As it stands, the Internet of Things ecosystem is fragmented. Intelligent devices like the Nest Thermostat typically communicate back to proprietary cloud resources and might communicate with their surroundings using any one of a number of wireless protocols, including Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and so on.  That balkanization has made it hard to create IoT solutions that span different families […]

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