Imagine a nice Tuesday morning in the not so distant future. Here is what happens:
1) You try to check the weather in the morning before you go to work, but the popular mainstream weather site that you use, with all the pretty radar pictures, is down, and no matter how many times you refresh the screen, it won’t come up.
2) You get to work (and you are underdressed, as you couldn’t check the weather!) and when you go to get your coffee, the floor is covered in water because the coffee machine malfunctioned (it’s piped into the office water supply) and ran most of the night. Needless to say, management has unplugged it, and if you want coffee you have to go down the street.
3) You go to log on and pull up your spreadsheet, and as soon as you do, a pixelated image of Mike Tyson dances across your screen, and his digital laugh blasts through your computer speakers… and, you notice, it’s playing through the speakers of your co-workers.
4) You decide to head outside, as you need coffee, and you can’t get your spreadsheet opened, and as you do, you pass by a company HP printer, which is spewing out picture of old Blackbeard.
5) Finally, waiting on your coffee order at the coffee store, you see a shocking Facebook update, where a friend’s uncle (you don’t know the uncle, but seemed like a nice guy) has been killed by a mysterious heart attack, but he had a pacemaker just put in.
What is going on here? Let’s walk through each “science fiction” scenario…
…in (1), (2), and (3) it’s apparent that someone has hacked into your corporate network and wreaked a whole bunch of havoc. That coffee machine was connected to the wireless network, so that it could automatically order coffee. Hacked. Your network has malicious software installed, showing that picture of Tyson and preventing everyone from getting things done.
Who knows what confidential info of yours (think social security number, payroll info, etc.) was also taken from the corporate network?
In (4) above, that HP printer (as it turns out here in our “fake” scenario) was the gateway for the army of hackers into your network. No one had ever changed the default password on the printer, and instead of battling the hackers on the beach, it put out the welcome mat.
In (5), someone nearby (physically) that uncle used the wireless capability of the pacemaker (used for routine checkups at the cardiologist clinic) to hack in and cause the pacemaker to go haywire, killing the nice man.
So, none of this is really science fiction right now. It’s reality, today.
Just the other day, a group of hackers commanded 100,000 devices connected to the internet (the internet of things IoT) to start hitting the servers at an internet company called Dyn – this caused a massive outage for the businesses (and there were many) using Dyn for server space.
These hackers turned into army generals, ordering an entire army of mindless, online things to attack the hackers’ enemy of choice. These online soldiers may have actually included your router or baby monitor, if you didn’t change the default password on them! You may have loaned a mercenary soldier or two to the battle, without knowing it!
The pacemaker possibility is very real – many medical devices can now be accessed using nearby wireless technology.
HP printers are very common on corporate networks, and it’s very common to have them sitting on the network without any changes to the default security settings. That’s like giving hackers the keys to the corporate castle, by lowering the drawbridge and telling all the troops to go home for the day.
The Internet of Things (IoT), which are being connected in greater numbers every day, and these devices are all around you, and the SECURITY for these things, are an emerging technology that affect us all.
And, you can also invest in these emerging technologies! Our new ebook “5 Emerging Technologies for Investors in 2017” will be published around December 1st, 2016, and it’s going to be a deep dive into emerging technologies, including IoT and IoT security. It’s for investors that want to learn more about these technologies, so they can become better investors.
The ebook is free to you, please register here to be the first one to get it when it’s published.
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