The Internet of Things: A New Landscape of Threats

In recent years, we've been inundated by media coverage of hacking incidents that are carried out around the globe. On a daily basis, credit card data is stolen, identities are forged, services are overloaded, and private information is leaked. According to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) on the global state of information security, the rate of information security incidents has grown 48% in 2014 to 42.8 million, which is the equivalent of 117,339 attacks per day.

As mind-boggling as that number may seem, the rate of security incidents is not going down. As computation costs decrease and the number of software-controlled systems increase, this problem will only get worse. New devices, networks, cloud technologies, and users are being added every day and will all contribute to this phenomenon. Devices used in Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are particularly susceptible to attacks based on the fact that they are often resource-constrained, making standard security mechanisms difficult, and they are physically more accessible, making them easier targets to compromise.

In January 2015, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released several guidelines regarding security for IoT devices and platforms, including designing products with authentication in mind, protecting the interfaces between products and other devices/services, and taking advantage of what experts already know about IoT security. Check out our Security in Internet of Things Systems white paper to see how Exosite has thought through these security concerns and developed a world-class IoT platform to address them.