While the modern-day Internet supports considerable security controls such as encryption, identification, and authentication, this was not always the case. Concerns regarding cybersecurity were largely absent during the initial development and deployment of the early Internet. As a result, many of today's commonly used security solutions have been designed and applied piecemeal. So it's no surprise that several newly discovered flaws in the underlying network stack infrastructure, unknown and unpatched since the late 1990s, have recently been discovered. The implications of such vulnerabilities can prove catastrophic for the perpetually growing IoT landscape.
An Israel cybersecurity company named JSOF has managed to uncover a series of zero-day vulnerabilities in an old TCP/IP software library. Vulnerabilities that exist, but are unknown to the affected product vendor, are commonly referred to as zero-day vulnerabilities. The nature of these flaws mean they are exploitable until the vulnerable systems are patched by the vendor. However, even if a patch is released, many updates (especially on older components) cannot be automatically executed, and require human interaction to install. As a result, zero-day vulnerabilities simultaneously pose the greatest threats to information security, while being viewed as the most sought-after prize for cybercriminals to attain and share.
In total, JSOF discovered 19 of these vulnerabilities, but named the batch of flaws Ripple20 to illustrate the "ripple effect" these security defects will have on connected devices for years to come. The specific flaws themselves were determined to have spawned from a Cincinnati-based organization named Treck Inc. Treck was responsible for developing a high-performance TCP/IP protocol suite ..
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