IoT Security Concerns Peaking – With No End In Sight – Threatpost – The first stop for security news
SAN FRANCISCO – With the massive influx of connected devices into our digital lives, it’s no surprise that IoT security was on the forefront of the 2018 RSA Conference this year. But despite numerous talks about IoT vulnerabilities this week, a clear resolution seems nowhere in sight.
“A lot of the manufacturing behind IoT devices today feels like the Gold Rush… everyone wants to get there in a hurry,” said John Cook, senior director of product management at Symantec, speaking at RSAC. “You effectively have people staking out a claim in the area without further thought to security.”
IoT smart home devices make up a particularly lucrative market, with consumer IoT spending set to reach $62 billion in 2018, making it the fourth largest industry segment, according to market research firm IDC. However many of these devices are built with little to no security in mind.
The 2016 Mirai botnet attack, which was orchestrated as a distributed denial of service attack through 300,000 vulnerable Internet of Things devices like webcams, routers and video recorders, showed just how big of an impact the lack of IoT security has.
Since then, however, little seems to have changed in terms of security for connected smart home devices. Tony Anscombe, global security evangelist with ESET, proved this by spending months testing 12 IoT devices such as smart scales to wearables, and found an array of security issues – from passwords stored in plain text to encryption issues