7 Major Security Dispute with IoT (Internet of Things)

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the latest technology revolutions that the world has seen in the recent times and have changed the way the world perceived technoogy. Devices, enabled with IoT are deviced with sensors, that can communicate with each other through the sensors and transfer relevant information, thus reducing human interventions.

However, IoT faces some security challenges which are as follows:

Lack of sufficient testing and regular updation

One of the major challenges that is faced by IoT is insufficient testing. With the wide use of IoT, over 23 billion devices are connected to each other, which is increasing day by day. With such wide spread connectivity, security becomes a major issue. These devices faces a major issue, when it comes to ensuring security. Most of the devices as well as the IoT products fail to get enough updates, thus making them extremely vulnerable. This results in lack of enough security even for the devices that were once considered to be secured. Most of the companies offer updates for a very short period of time, thus making it prone to security breaches.

Issues of default password and brute force attack

Most of the IoT devices are sold by the manufacturing companies with default passwords, which are quite often not changed by the users, due to lack of awareness, making these devices easily hackable. Weak and predictable passwords make IoT devices face a major security issue and this is the reason, why Mirai malware could play such a havoc, as it exploited the default and weak passwords.

Ransomware and Malware

With the increase in the number of IoT devices threats of Ransomware and Malware are also increasing. The traditional Ransomware uses encryption to lock out the users from the devices, thus limiting the user’s accessibility to the device. With IoT devices connected to each other, a number of devices can be exploited in the similar way to affect even more number of devices.

IoT botnet aiming at cryptocurrency

With the advent of the blockchain technologies, cryptocurrency are being used widely. Though blockchain is considered resistant towards hacking, yet this sector faces a huge amount of exploitations. However, the vulnerability is not in the blockchain, but in the devices and applications that on which the blockchain applications run. The open soured cryptocurrency Monero is being mined with the IoT devices and hence is exposed to exploitations. Social engineering is also one of the major ways in which passwords are stolen and exploited by the hackers.

Data privacy and security concerns

Data privacy and security policies are present everywhere. However, these are exploited and the privacy policies are violated. Private information are sold out or leaked to unauthorised and untrusted sources, resulting in increase of data privacy and security concerns. Cache and information that are no longer needed, has to be disposed off securely, such that these data cannot be misused by the hackers.

IoT attacks that evade detection

Number of small scale attacks that are easy to evade detection are likely to be the major threats for IoT. Large-scale exploits are easier detection with higher security. Hence, they are difficult to launch. However, small scale attacks make them difficult to detect, thus resulting in greater exploitations.

Artificial Intelligence and automation

AI and automation have taken control of our lives in various important sectors, as they are more efficient and effective than human counterpart. However, using autonomous systems in order to make anonymous decisions might cost in exposure to vulnerability and exploits such as hacking, resulting in security compromise.

These are some of the major security challenges faced by the IoT world. Most of these challenges can be resolved by incorporating strict privacy policies and security policies, that makes vulnerabilities lose its ground.