The phenomenal growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), widely hailed in 2015, has been greater than originally forecast. Gartner, Inc. estimates a 30 percent increase in IoT devices connected to the Internet in 2016, which equates to 6.4 billion devices, and forecasts that more than 20 billion devices will be connected to the Internet before 2020. On average, 5.5 million new devices are connected to the Internet each day. As the IoT becomes part of the everyday lexicon, there remains a need to examine the myriad risks associated with this explosive growth across multiple industry sectors to address the inevitable weaknesses with software and security that will be part of the foreseeable future of the IoT. In turn, these vulnerabilities can and will lead to property damage, bodily injuries and deaths. Internet attacks leading to physical damage date back to the 2010 cyberattack on the Iranian nuclear energy plant in Natanz that destroyed or disabled centrifuges. Later, in 2014, a German steel foundry was the target of a cyberattack leading to the destruction of a blast furnace.
…
Continue Reading The Internet of Things: The Cyber Vulnerability Landscape Emerges