Scan of 16 million homes worldwide shows many consumers still use manufacturer passwords that come with devices
In the largest global study of the Internet of Things in consumers’ homes, researchers from Avast and Stanford University have shown a surprising emergence of IoT devices in consumer homes and shed light on troubling number of devices that continue to use guessable passwords.
The study provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of IoT devices by leveraging user-initiated network scans of 83 million devices in 16 million households worldwide.
The findings will be published in a paper, All Things Considered: An Analysis of IoT Devices on Home Networks, which will be appearing at USENIX Security this week. Avast researchers scanned the devices to understand the distribution of IoT devices by type and manufacturer and to understand the security profiles of various devices. The findings were validated and analyzed in collaboration with Stanford researchers.
Concrete evidence of suspected patterns
The researchers say it is vital that the security community understands the types of IoT devices that consumers install and their respective regional distributions given their increasing security and privacy implications. The new data provides concrete evidence of patterns that have previously been suspected but not proven.
“The security community has long discussed the security problems associated with emerging IoT devices. Unfortunately, these devices have long remained hidden behind home routers and we’ve had little large scale data on the types of devices deployed in actual homes. This data helps us shed light on the global emergence of IoT and types of the se ..
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