Editorial Staff
In each of such device there are on an average 25 different vulnerable points, which means 250 vulnerabilities across only 10 such devices. Think about it, in the long run the hackers has the potential of hacking an entire office or house hold. The problems is that the things involved in securing the gadgets like password strength, encryption software are completely hack able, which leads to total lack of security. HP in its statement said that, it had heard about a lot of Internet of Things and IoT security, but nothing concrete was done about its security. Nobody seemed to be having the complete picture of the IoT security. Hence they decided to start the OWASP Internet of Things Top 10 Project. The main aim of the project would be to educate people about the facts of Internet of Things, so that common people are concerned about the security and takes care about it.
HP found out that the biggest areas of weakness are the areas of privacy concerns, lack of transport encryption, insufficient authorization, insecure web structure and most importantly inadequate software protection. As if this was not scary enough, recent Pew report, within the next twenty years or so, everything will be connected by the IoT, which would also mean locking down the devices. Hence the security of our homes and offices will be compromised.
As rightly pointed by a source in Re/Code, the basic problem is that each device are basically tiny computers, which are being built by people, but those same people are not taking enough care to secure them, like they would do foe the traditional computer. Gartner predicts that by the year 2020, the Internet of Things will be made of 26 billion units. Now it only needs to be seen whether they will be safe or not or will the devices become smarter than us.
Gollapalli Nithin Kumar
