IoT (Internet of Things) is an exceptional analytics system and automation that uses big data, networking, sensing, and artificial intelligence technology to create extensive service-based applications or products. Such procedures help in better management, transparency, and performance when incorporated in any industry or process.
However, IoT security is an on-demand cloud subscription service that people design to protect and discover the increasing number of connected things on your network. In other words, it covers both network security and physical device security, includes technologies, processes, and necessary measures for the prevention of IoT devices and networks.
We all know the Internet of things can give companies several economic opportunities and allow them for interesting developments that vary from hospitality to mining, from childcare to eldercare, from education to transportation. Various IoT solutions are available in the market. Whether it is about predictive maintenance, remote monitoring, connected products, smart spaces, or customer-facing technologies like mobile applications, everything which is based on the IoT helps reduce costs, operational complexity, and speeding up time to market.
What is the Safety Issue with the Internet of Things?
Though IoT devices may seem too specialized to be dangerous, there is a real risk in what are general-purpose machine and network-connected systems, which can be easily hijacked or hacked by hackers.
When such systems hack over the internet, even the most boring software from video baby monitors to interrupted devices on life-saving health care equipment becomes unsafe. If this equipment comes into the hands of attackers, they take advantage of this and try to steal data, disrupting services that you deliver to customers, and even poses the risks of cybercrimes. Besides, attacks that are committed by attackers cause damage to IoT infrastructure and damage those things that people are already running or depend on.
Protecting valuable operation technologies, customers, employees, and business investments with secure IoT infrastructure require an end-to-end methodology. Some experienced IoT security companies use it to secure data in the cloud during storage and processing, to safe connectivity between the cloud and devices, and to secure provisioning of devices.
As per our discussion in this blog, we can say that insecurity is the biggest concern for IoT devices. The researchers of F-Secure Security also warn that cyber attacks on IoT systems/devices are growing faster. Even the industry’s “Attack Landscape H1 2019” observed a three-fold increase in attack traffic to over 2.9 billion events. The company uses honeypots – worldwide decoy servers defined as day-to-day operational hardware to attract frequent attacks – but this is the first time that threats on those honeypots “have hit the billion mark.”
Furthermore, the IoT’s global market reached $100 billion in revenue for the first time in 2017, and forecasts suggest that this figure will increase to about $1.6 trillion by 2025. The IoT market’s size in Europe is projected to reach €242,222 million by the end of 2020. IoT-connected devices’ growing popularity can keep IoT app development organizations busy in the future for overcoming security threats.
Latest IoT Security Issues & the Best Ways to Prevent Them
Network Hacking
Network hacks happen when the device gets corrupted over the network with which it is connected. Network hacking is also a breaching activity that supports hackers in gaining system ownership. No doubt, due to the digital transformation, the data which we send over a network can transfer in an encoded format. Still, hackers are smart enough and know how to stream such types of information by using smart strategies.
Fitness trackers and smartwatches are very popular IoT products that many professionals wear today before going to their offices. But do you know? These IoT based devices can put the companies at risk of cyber threats because most departments of corporate management don’t understand that these devices run as per the network. As per data from the information security company Infoblox, about 46% of the industries have found ‘Shadow’ IoT devices on their networks over the prior year. Thus, if workers connect more IoT products to networks, then the chances of cyberattacks are high in industries.
It is necessary to get the quality service of Penetration Testing, which is called pen testing or ethical hacking. This testing technique can be used for web applications, networks, and even computer systems to prevent sensitive information from hackers. The other solution is to turn on your system’s firewalls for web applications and utilize secure socket layers or SSL protocols to handle the online data safely.
If you want to obtain the quality with IoT security, you can consider the penetration testing with automated testing tools and include a little bit of a blend of manual penetration tests from testers to acquire the benefits like customer loyalty, client-server communication protection, improved customer’s trust, and brand reputation.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
In computing language, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a dangerous attempt to make machine resources or networks unavailable to its target audience. It is a “Denial of Service” in which the server is never compromised, the database is never viewed, and the data is never deleted. It is not possible to change the server after and throughout the attack.
The distributed denial of service attack acts as traffic congestion, also called a traffic jam from a high-level viewpoint. This traffic jam aims to block up the roads and protect everyday traffic from arriving at its desired location. If the IoT (Internet of Things) provides numerous advantages such as M2M (machine-to-machine) communication or encouraging the communication between devices, you may experience higher security issues.
Firstly, you have to understand that developers don’t provide powerful security features in IoT devices during development. Due to that, hackers take advantage and steal the information from IoT systems. Apart from personal privacy concerns and protection issues that occur from such security flaws, the most significant risk with these IoT-based connected devices is it gives permissions to hackers to form botnets called Zombie Armies.
Zombie armies can install on millions of connected devices to release a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. It is also used to send spam attacks. The more the IoT devices will launch, the higher the security risks will be increased.
Getting fuzzing or Fuzz testing is crucial. It is an automated software testing technique that helps protect IoT devices against DDoS attacks. With this testing, the applications can check for irregularities such as possible failures, memory leaks, or loss of in-built code statements. It focuses on providing invalid, unexpected, or random data inputs to computer programs. Its aim is to improve the IoT applications, provide robustness with security testing methods, and ensure that the software is correctly programmed to avoid DDoS attacks.
Conclusion
Lack of device management, insufficient privacy protection, guessable passwords, outdated components usage, data transfer & storage insecurity, weak network services, insecure ecosystem interfaces, poor update control is several latest IoT threats or weaknesses that have a severe impact on the quality of IoT devices when the proper testing is not taken into the process. Moreover, common internet of things security attacks are man-in-the-middle, social engineering, ransomware, botnets, denial of service, social engineering that one should understand in detail and overcome with the IoT security testing and QA testing to ensure the delivery of quality-made services of IoT devices.
