Internet of Things News of the Week, June 16, 2017
In case you didn’t think cybersecurity threats were scary enough: The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology this week shared some astounding cyber stats in support of raising awareness for encrypted systems. Data breaches in government systems, for example, take an average of 229 days to detect, and there were 72 of them in 2016 alone. ICIT notes that roughly half of all breaches in these systems exposed social security numbers. What makes these types of attacks on both government and commercial systems especially concerning is that service providers often don’t know they’ve been hacked. As ICIT says, “There are only two types of networks, those that have been compromised and those that are compromised without the operator’s awareness.” You can read more here, if I haven’t frightened you too much.
Guess who’s inside the new Eero 2nd gen routers? If you guessed Qualcomm, you’d be correct. In May, Qualcomm debuted its Mesh Networking Platform for OEMs to build more powerful wireless routers with advanced capabilities such as support for voice controls and multiple radio protocols like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 802.15.4, which includes Zigbee and Thread. Score another spot in home devices — adding to phones, tablets, televisions and more — for Qualcomm chips. Bonus fact: The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communications inside Amazon’s Echo are run by a Qualcomm Atheros chip. Read more…
