THE RISKS OF IOT DEVICES

What if I told you that your regular Internet of Things, IoT device could be complicit in large scale cyber attacks? An IoT device is any hardware device with the ability to connect to the internet or a network. This could be your computers, mobile phones or regular smart devices. Computers and mobile phones usually come with enough security measures to make them less susceptible to cyberattacks, unlike the others which have little or no security measures to prevent this. These are devices like smart watches, Wi-Fi cameras, Wi-Fi routers, smart TVs, and so many others. These devices usually come with default passwords which are hardly changed by users. Even when changed, they are changed to a weaker password than the defaults ones.

How exactly could your smart device be of any importance to hackers? In October 2016, the services of many major sites like Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, New York Times, were disrupted.

How did this happen? A Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS attack was launched at Dyn, the DNS (Domain Naming System) registration service provider that was being used by these sites. The hackers in this case were able to create a botnet (robot network) of devices named Mirai using a malware (malicious software) that infected up to 145,000 devices of unsuspecting owners. These devices were used to launch requests to Dyn’s Server, overloaded it’s bandwidth and ultimately crashing it. Over the years, there have also been campaigns of Ransome DDoS extortion attacks, where organizations were threatened to pay a ransom or face being attacked by a DDoS by hackers.

With all these, the importance of adequately securing your smart devices cannot be overemphasized. The following steps should be considered when it comes to securing IoT devices.

• Change the default password to a strong password containing a mix of small and big cap letters, numbers, and symbols, at least 12 characters long.
• Update the device regularly.
• Use anti-malware, firewalls, and VPN in your network.
• Segment your network, restricting less important devices direct access to important devices in the network.
• When not in use, turn off the network signals or connections of these devices.

References

https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/1023/How-Friday-s-cyberattack-shut-down-Netflix-Twitter-and-Spotify https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/the-mirai-botnet-threats-and-mitigations https://nordvpn.com/blog/iot-attacks/