Internet of Things security: What happens when every device is smart and you don’t even know it?
From ZD net
By Danny Palmer | March 20, 2017
Excerpts:
Billions more everyday items are set to be connected to the internet in the next few years, especially as chips get cheaper and cheaper to produce — and crucially, small enough to fit into even the smallest product.
Potentially, any standard household item could become connected to the internet, even if there’s no reason for the manufacturers to do so.
Eventually that processors needed to power an IoT device will become effectively free, making it possible to turn anything into a internet-enabled device.
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“The price of turning a dumb device into a smart device will be 10 cents,” says Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure.
However, it’s unlikely that consumer will be the one who gains the biggest benefits from every device their homes collecting data; it’s those who build them who will reap the greatest rewards — alongside government surveillance services.
“It’s going to be so cheap that vendors will put the chip in any device, even if the benefits are only very small. But those benefits won’t be benefits to you, the consumer, they’ll be benefits for the manufacturers because they want to collect analytics,” says Hyppönen, speaking at Cloud Expo Europe.
For example, a kitchen appliance manufacturer might collect data and use it for everything from seeing how often the product breaks to working out where customers live and altering their advertising accordingly in an effort to boost sales — and the user might not even know this is happening, if devices have their own 5G connection and wouldn’t even need access to a home Wi-Fi network.
“The IoT devices of the future won’t go online to benefit you — you won’t even know that it’s an IoT device,” says Hyppönen.
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However, various incidents have demonstrated how the Internet of Things is ripe with security vulnerabilities as vendors put profit and speed to market before anything else, with cybersecurity very low down the list of priorities.
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“The reality of the human mind is as we embed things, we tend to forget about them, we get complacent about them. Many of you are probably wearing a smart device on your wrist to monitor your behaviour and exercise routines. But no doubt two weeks after you started wearing it, you forgot it was there,” he says.
“The danger from a psychological perspective is that people forget about that technology and forget about the risks associated with it and our own personal mitigation of that risk.”
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Read the full article, with links, here
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