Tag: Internet of Things

Supply Chain Transparency Doesn’t Extend To Security

We live in an ever-more unstable world in which massive disruptions, whether natural or man-made, are a frequent occurrence. Companies that make everything from aircraft to mobile phones to cappuccino need to be nimble – sidestepping global calamities that might idle assembly lines or leave customers without their morning cup of coffee.  As in other areas, the benefits of technology advancements like cheap, cloud based computing, remote sensors and mobility are transforming the way that companies manage their vast, global network of suppliers. These days, supply chain transparency is all the rage – allowing companies to share information seamlessly and in realtime with their downstream business partners and suppliers. Firms like the start-ups Sourcemap, and LlamaSoft are offering “supply chain visualization” technology that leverages a familiar formula these days: mobility, social networking, crowd-sourced intelligence, and “Big Data” analytics. [There’s more to read about supply chain security on The Security Ledger.]  However, as […]

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IT Pros: Internet Of Things Is A Governance Disaster

Not that we needed a survey to tell us this: but IT pros are seriously concerned about the risks posed by all the IP-enabled devices that are starting to connect to their corporate networks. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 2,013 members of ISACA, a worldwide association of information security professionals, which found almost unanimous agreement that the Internet of Things poses a governance problem for their networks, with increased security threats the most oft-cited governance issue raised by IoT adoption. The survey (PDF) also polled 4,000 consumers in the U.S., U.K., India and Mexico, finding that IT professionals were less sanguine than consumers about the transformative potential of the Internet of Things for enterprises. Just four in 10 agreed that the benefits of IoT adoption outweighed the risks, while half of the ISACA members polled felt that the benefits of IoT to consumers outweighed the risks. Around a quarter of […]

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Identity Management’s Next Frontier: The Interstate

Factory-installed and even aftermarket identity management applications may soon be standard components on automobiles, as the federal government looks for ways to leverage automation and collision avoidance technology to make the country’s highways and roadways safer.   That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which finds that vehicle to vehicle communications are poised to take off, but that significant security and privacy challenges must first be met, identity management top among them. The report, GAO 14-13 (PDF available here) takes the measure of what the GAO calls “Intelligent Transportation Systems,” including vehicle-to-vehicle (or V2V) technology. The GAO found that V2V technology that allows automobiles to communicate with each other in ways that can prevent accidents has advanced considerably in recent years. Automakers, working with the Department of Transportation, are testing the technology in real-world scenarios. However, the deployment of V2V technologies faces a number […]

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BlueTooth on Your Defibrillator? The Case Against Wi-Fi

As more and more devices become networked, the use cases for wireless communications protocols like Bluetooth and NFC (Near Field Communications) multiply. Hardly a week goes by where some company figures out a way to pair wireless communications with some inanimate object or another. (Bluetooth bike locks, anyone?) But what happens when those wireless devices run critical infrastructure or life-saving technology like implanted medical devices? We learned earlier this week that no less than Dick Cheney was concerned enough about wireless attacks on his implanted defibrillator that he had the wireless management features of the device disabled, for fear they could be used in an assassination attempt. Security experts, like Dr. Kevin Fu at The University of Michigan,  doubtful that such an attack was realistic, also refused to rule it out entirely. Given the many, proven tools and strategies for hacking wireless communications like Bluetooth, you might think that foregoing well […]

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Is A Nest Botnet In Our Future? A Conversation With IoT Researcher Daniel Buentello

Daniel Buentello is one of the top security researchers out there looking into the security of common, consumer products that are part of the growing “Internet of Things.” Most recently, Buentello has been making the rounds of security cons with a presentation he calls “Weaponizing Your Coffee Pot.” The talk, which Bountello presented at the recent DerbyCon hacker conference in Kentucky and at ToorCon in Seattle in July. That talk was something of a call to arms for security folk to start poking around the growing list of IP-enabled consumer products. Buentello notes that most – including products from large firms like Belkin are insecure by design and in deployment. As we noted when we wrote about Buentello presentation early in October, the interesting stuff here is Daniel’s methodology for reverse engineering the software that runs these commercial developments, which offers something of a blueprint for others to follow.  More recently, Buentello turned his gaze to […]

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