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Security, Privacy, and the Internet of Things (IoT)
- Edited by Aviva de Groot, Bart van der Sloot
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- Book:
- Handbook of Privacy Studies
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 October 2018, pp 209-212
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Summary
The IoT revolution is happening, whether we like it or not. And the reason is simple: Cost versus benefits. It's becoming very cheap to add Internet connectivity to appliances and things. When connectivity is cheap, the benefits don't have to be very large for vendors to adopt it.
In many cases, devices won't go online to benefit the consumer; rather, the benefit will be for the manufacturer. For example, home appliances can collect analytics about how and when they’re used, or about customers’ physical locations. Information like this is extremely valuable to vendors. This means that even the most mundane of machines, like toasters, will eventually go online – to collect data. Because data is the new oil.
That's not to say that the IoT won't offer consumer benefits – of course it will. Imagine the convenience of being able to fire up your coffee maker while you’re in bed or switch on your washing machine while you’re at work. Smart homes also offer improved safety – think of a security system that alerts you when it detects something suspicious. Energy efficiency is another benefit, one that translates to cost savings – take the example of a thermostat that optimizes performance based on your behaviours. And a host of other IoT innovations promise to boost our quality of life.
Do a Google image search for ‘smart home’ and you’re bombarded with visuals of sleek, polished living spaces in ultramodern white. But the problem with this whole picture, as attractive as it is, is that cyber security is too often missing from the design.
Cyber security, you see, is not a selling point for something like a washing machine. Selling points for washing machines are size, colour, price, load capacity, and wash programmes. Because security is not a selling point, appliance vendors can't invest a lot in it. This leads to insecure appliances. And we’ve already seen where that leads.
We’ve already seen several botnets targeting IoT, the biggest of them being the Mirai botnet. There were more than 100,000 hacked systems in the original Mirai attack network, and none of them were computers – they were all IoT devices. In other words, they were all appliances from our homes.
The existence of the Mirai botnet was possible because of the use of default login credentials on those devices.
7 - Silicon Plagues
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- By Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of F-Secure in Finland and a columnist
- Edited by Jonathan L. Heeney, University of Cambridge, Sven Friedemann, University of Bristol
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- Book:
- Plagues
- Published online:
- 24 March 2017
- Print publication:
- 09 February 2017, pp 168-183
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Summary
Digital technology is changing at a faster pace than any other part of our world. The development of the integrated circuit started a revolution that eventually led to the development of technologies like packet-switched networks, which were required to create the internet and the worldwide web. It's easy to see how many beneficial things personal computers and the internet have brought us. They have changed not only our communication and the way we entertain ourselves, but also the way we think. Unfortunately, they have also brought us new kinds of risks.
The online world is a reflection of the real world. Just like we have crime in the world, we have crime in the online world as well. The big difference is that distances and country borders do not exist in the online world – we are not safe from an online criminal just because he's living faraway. Today, our world is largely dependent on digital networks, from personal banking to stock markets to military systems.
How real is the risk of a digital Plague?
Very real.
We've already been fighting computer viruses and other types of malware for decades. They have evolved from simple, straightforward attacks to complicated, global outbreaks. In some ways, the evolution of online attacks resembles biological evolution. But the difference is that all computer attacks are created and launched by humans. By looking at examples of key malware attacks through the years, we can see how attacks on our digital world have evolved over time.
The Origins of Computer Viruses
Brain.A is considered to be the first PC virus in history. It was first detected in 1986. Several variants of the virus followed but most of them were fairly harmless. It ran on IBM-PCs and compatibles with PC-DOS operation systems. Brain was a boot sector virus, infecting the first sector of floppy discs as they were inserted into an infected computer. Brain was only a few kilobytes in size. Before Brain infected diskettes, it looked for a ‘signature’. This made it possible to ‘inoculate’ against the virus by putting the signature in the correct place of the boot sector of a clean floppy. Such floppies would not get infected even if they were inserted into an infected computer. The Brain virus tried to hide from detection by hooking the operating system functions that were used to read the floppy drive.