2015 faces a big question — Internet of Things is providing you comfort and security or robbing it of you? People are not skeptical about the fact that Internet of Things is a multi trillion dollar business but they are oblivious that IoT at the same time is a potential disaster for privacy and security.
IoT’s immense influx of real-time data marks the beginning of new marketing, sales and customer service opportunities. And yes, I am not talking of the non-commercial personal aspects of IoT yet. I am talking in specifically about mobile app development.
With the change in information landscape due to the Internet of Things there has been a considerable change to the attack surface and threat environment of the Internet and connected systems. And it will definitely open a whole new scope of cyber attacks.
Internet of Things security is difficult to discuss as it is an immense concept and when you make everything IP-connected then how do you lock down security? And the span of “everything” stretches from your home appliances like refrigerator, music system, etc to your car and even to your office devices, office desk etc so the challenge is to take care of security on all these devices, all IoT enabled surfaces, walls, glasses, gadgets and everything. If IoT is connecting them all, so is it also connecting the risks to all these channels. Dangerous.
Capture…Disrupt…Manipulate !! You must be wondering why such derogatory terms out of the blue but rather you should be concerned which of your devices are subjected to any one or all of these RISKS!
Let us see the different types of threat one by one:
1. Capture Attack:
Systems composing the Internet of Things are very much susceptible to the various capture attacks which are done either to capture data or gain access to the devices. The data is omnipresent and thus providing the attacker greater access to gain physical or logical proximity to the targets.
2. Disrupt and Destroy Attack:
Apart from the capture attack there is also a high probability of the disrupt-and-destroy attacks. Unless they exist within the hardened environment they are subjected to physical abuse and tampering and if they are mobile devices they are also susceptible to displacement. However tampering of data is only feasible if the attacker has caught hold of a single or all the loopholes in that particular environment.
3. Manipulated Attack:
Manipulated attack is another grave situation in which the attacker intervenes with the decision cycle of the opponent. In certain cases they either capture and manipulate the embedded data in the systems and in some cases they may directly manipulate the sensors used for gathering the information. Sometimes the attacker also intervenes the communication channel transferring the data and exerts control over transmission of data as per their requirement.