The massive buzz around the Internet of Things (IoT) at CES 2017 in Las Vegas earlier this month accentuated what is obvious to most anyone paying attention: Manufacturers are going all-in on connectivity as a way to differentiate themselves and attract new customers to everything from cars to appliances. Given all the hype, it’s no surprise that IoT growth is a popular topic for research firms, but more and more of those research projections are quickly followed by warnings of the innate security risks of IoT.
Juniper Research released a report on Monday forecasting that the consumer IoT installed base will reach more than 15 billion units by 2021, which is an increase of 120 percent over 2016. However, the firm cautioned that the vast scale of this connectivity could lead to an unmanageable cybersecurity risk created by botnets in excess of 1 million units. That is “unless action is taken,” Juniper says.
“Internet of Things for Security Providers: Opportunities, Strategies, and Market Leaders 2016-2021” suggests that recent IoT botnet attacks are only the beginning, including the highly publicized distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last year. That was reported to be the biggest one ever.
“Attacks such as those on Dyn last October can be viewed as proof of concepts,” Steffen Sorrell, the research’s author says. “In the medium-term, botnets will be used far more creatively − not only to disrupt services, but also to create a distraction enabling multi-pronged attacks aimed at data theft or physical asset disruption.”
The Juniper report calls on IoT device manufacturers to “take responsibility by implementing security-by-design,” and adds that corporate-scale vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Samsung “should lead efforts to galvanize other vendors to apply security best practices.”
The report also predicts that the industry will be forced to move beyond traditional signature-based detection methods in the near term in order to address IoT cybersecurity effectively. A white paper, “IoT: Internet of Transformation” whitepaper is available to download from the Juniper website and includes more details around the full research.
In related news, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a report a couple months back urging developers, manufacturers, and service providers to boost security around IoT to curtail growing cybersecurity risks around connected devices. More on that is here.
