What is Internet of Things?
Let’s try to understand by taking benefits and examples of the IoT technology in real life scenario. I would like to decipher IoT as how it looks like when the extraordinary can become the every day.
We can turn off our lights from anywhere in the world using our smart phone. Driver-less cars are just around the corner. We’re living in the future, one we thought was lifetimes away. It’s part of a new revolution. The Internet of Things. IoT is any physical object that you connect to the Internet. IoT is where physical systems and the information systems collide.
As a cyber security professional, I take all the new technologies suspiciously, and for the same fact I take IoT as intelligence smart devices that bring the risks and threats that we’ve always seen in the industrial and digital control system space, into the lives of real people.
Our fridges can remind us what to pick up at the store. Doctors can check on patient’s status from the other side of the world. Cities can monitor everything from trash cans to buses. The potential is seemingly endless. The advantages of the IoT and the data that it produces are going to be enormous, from a personal health issue, to the physical reliability of roads and bridges. We should be able to know, in advance Before roads, bridges, cars, whatever, our fail. It starts ordering books on Amazon or making phone calls to overseas locations. That might decide would be anonymous behavior for a light bulb that shouldn’t be permitted.
Manufacturers, vendors, suppliers, wholesalers, or whosoever is related to the IoT related product development or IT product supply chain management for the IT and Cybersecurity should spend their time thinking about how we, general public, industry, and individuals can best work together to tackle this new world.
However, amazing new biomedical advances like this one may come with their own risks. If we’re not careful. If we don’t think about the fact that that computing device can execute code and that visor, now or in the future when it becomes a fully functional bionic eye, can see a QR code. And then flip it into executing malicious code and then that person gets ransomware to get their eyesight back. That would be a shame. Putting a device out there where you don’t have an ability to secure and that it lasts for a very long time, that’s a very dangerous thing. Our digital lives have become natural extension of the physical world. We keep up with friends on social media. We control our home from our cell phones. If you leave your front door unlocked at home, odds are low that people are going to be stopping by to check. But in the cyber world, countless people are checking every door all the time. From botnet for instance, check these doors and when they found them easy to open, we’re able to infect webcams and digital video recorders. Hundreds of thousands, millions compromised. Compromised because of default username and passwords. And I’m not even talking about weak passwords, they’re default usernames and passwords. We’re moving so quickly. We’re innovating so quickly.
We don’t take the time to build in information security into new products. We don’t build in privacy. We have to find a way to do security differently, to build security in as opposed to slap it on in the end. And then there’s your data to consider. Whether it be my kid’s Barbie doll, to my car, to my HVAC, to all these sensors that are around me or with me. That give you my fully digital biological footprint. We must think about what that might mean, how do you deal with the privacy the implications of it, but also one of the ethical considerations on the use of that data. If we are going to go to a model where the data is being collected as we pass every garbage can and every traffic light think Americans who view the ability to go on the open road and drive down route 66 would be horrified and stand up and really argue against it. But with six and a half billion connected things in existence and 20 billion expected within only a couple of years, trying to live without using these connected devices gets tougher and tougher. You’re suddenly, you’re that guy in a wooden cabin in Montana generating your electricity from little stream that goes by and you know putting rabbits’ snares to eat. And that’s just the devices you get to choose. Many of today’s lifesaving devices are connected, and because of that are at risk for being hacked.
The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, industry, government and academia work side-by-side, developing practical solutions to some of industry’s Most pressing cyber security challenges. These medical infusion pumps are lifesaving devices connected to hospital networks. NIST and his partners looked at how to improve the security of these wireless pumps. One recommendation was to add digital certificate to the pump that would limit it to communicating only with specific servers. NIST publishes IT security guidelines based on this research. So that anyone in industry can pick them up and follow the guide as a proven method for addressing these risks. When I see the value in this is the convener. Bringing together true technical experts.
Private sector and government and Manufacturers, developers, often other other technical, but also the policy side. It’s about whether my kids are going to live in a nice world in 15 years. And so, I’m looking to NIST to solve that problem for me. While NIST can’t solve the problem alone, by collaborating we can work towards a more secure IOT future. Where? What’s extraordinary today, can truly become the everyday.
