The IoT Has Come A Long Way - But There's Still A Lot More To Be Done
IoTNOW, Thursday, June 6th, 2024
The track record of the IoT has been chaotic and exciting in equal measure. As new products have rushed out of factory floors onto store shelves and into the homes, factories and offices of businesses and consumers alike, they've been confronted with great new capabilities and new risks too.
IoT exploded into public consciousness only a few years ago and was eagerly taken up by businesses and consumers alike. Hackers quickly took notice of this growing attack surface and quickly found laughably easy ways to exploit it.
Those vulnerabilities became a powerfully destructive force exemplified by the brief - if massive - success of Mirai malware. This malware would use a brute force attack to guess a device's password out of a small library of commonly used passwords. Once it had successfully infected one device - it would scan for nearby devices and then start again. It was through the predictability of these devices' inbuilt passwords and Mirai's simple operation, that it managed to amass a botnet of millions of devices.