The Growth of Internet Of Things
It has taken over two decades for the ‘concept’ of the Internet of Things to become a reality that will impact many areas of business and society. Yet, it will take several more years before it is a daily reality in all possible areas.
The Internet of Things describes a vast range of applications, protocols, standards, architectures and data acquisition and analysis technologies whereby devices and appliances, which are equipped with sensors, specifically designed software and electronic systems, are connected to the Internet and other networks with a societal, industrial, business and human purpose in mind.
Central Home hubs that control and communicate with other things comes to mind when thinking about IOT devices, also smart watches that don’t need to ping back to the host device but connect directly to the internet is one of the biggest push for IOT wearables.
The Internet of Things still is a security nightmare. Both in consumer applications and industrial applications, there are many questions that need to be solved.
October 21st was a security nightmare for IOT devices, Critical internet infrastructures players in the US were hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took huge parts of the web down. Sites like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, and many others suffered crippling interruptions and, in some cases, blanket outages.
The cause was a Mirai-based IOT botnet, which sent malicious request from over 20 million IP addresses. The botnet took advantage of the vulnerable security of Internet of Things devices. Many smart home gadget or connected device anywhere that has weak login credentials got compromised. Mirai, a piece of malware, works by scanning the internet for those devices that still have factory default or static username and password combinations. It then takes control of those devices, turning them into bots that can then be wielded as part of a kind of army to overload networks and servers with nonsense requests that bring speeds to a crawl or even incite outright shutdowns.
Until the security issue with IOT devices are mitigated, its growth will be hampered
