It’s easy to forget that the ‘Internet of Things’ was only coined as a concept in 1999, but the issue of security has been its achilles heel from the very beginning. Today, Gartner has estimated that there are around 6.4 billion connected things in use but it warns that the costs of securing these ‘things’ is rising.
As the IoT has continued to develop and grow, so too have the threats involved, and the consequences of poor security. This situation reached a tipping point in late September 2016 when KrebsOnSecurity.com, the site of security researcher Brian Krebs, was hit by the biggest DDoS attack on record. This headline-grabbing attack was instigated by a BotNet of around 145,000 IoT devices (mainly webcams and DVRs) compromised by Mirai malware.
Barely a month later, Ars Technica reported on yet another BotNet that had infected almost 3,500 IoT devices in just five days. At around the same time, the Mirai BotNet was used to launch a vast attack on US and European internet infrastructure, bringing down sites including Twitter, Paypal and Spotify. These attacks are only going to get worse with the presence of such vast numbers of easily-compromised devices in the market.
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