The Internet of Things is vast, complex, and filled with risk – but network security can simplify it
Around the world, the millions of internet-connected gifts we exchanged over the holidays have been set up, making our homes “smarter.” And less secure.
Alexa, play scary music.
Relax. The robot dogs who can bark in six languages and the smart fridges that can file your taxes are not plotting against you in the middle of the night. That sci-fi Hollywood trope does us a disservice. The Internet of Things is much more interesting than that.
It is vast, diverse, and filled with weak credentials. Recently news broke about a leak of a massive list of Telnet login credentials for more than 500,000 servers, home routers, and smart devices, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
On that day, Avast Threat Labs saw cybercriminals attempt to access the Telnet port of our 500+ honeypots around the world 347,476 times. This shows that bots are constantly searching for weak internet connected devices to infect and add to their botnets. The IoT is complicated – it’s not a simplistic Hollywood cliche. It’s a vast ecosystem of millions of unique vulnerabilities. But your part of it can be simple. Our researchers at Avast worked with colleagues at Stanford University to analyze user-contributed scans of 16 million homes and 83 million devices. (No personally identifiable information was ever involved.) The researchers found two things all of us should understand.
First, there isn’t one Internet of Things – there are many. For instance, surveillance cameras are most popular in South and Southeast Asia, work devices such as fa ..
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