IoT's moment of truth -- who can secure the data flows?

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Innovative Internet of Things efforts need the maturity and experience of industrial internet service providers to secure data platforms and drive growth.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has now entered a period of showstopping and heartstopping security reality checks. While most people can see the promise and value of data feeds from and to physical things, there are justified anxieties about just how weak and easy to attack many IoT device networks are.

Where business verticals such as banking, financial services, and insurance are fighting hard to escape legacy technology platforms and evolve to be modern customer focused digital businesses, IoT has the opposite problem of often being too modern and cutting edge.

The exciting new 'white space' business opportunities rapidly becoming possible are all fraught with risks -- data is the valuable currency of digital and therefore the target of hackers. Lack of consistent standards, exploitable attack points, and a new era of high stress security efforts make IoT services work very challenging.

The so-far largest Denial of Service (DoS) attack in history was recently launched via hacked IP connected closed circuit television cameras made by Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology. A botnet propagated Mirai malware to the cameras which then flooded the US east coast with fake traffic, until Domain Name Servers crashed under the strain. And we can likely expect more such attacks.

Right now arguably the ultimate solution to stopping these attacks is internet service providers (ISPs) moving to cut off connectivity from any IP address that is relaying DoS junk data from compromised IoT devices, which this excellent article discusses...

Read more: IoT's moment of truth -- who can secure the data flows? | ZDNet