Is your thermostat spying on you? Cyberthreats and the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things opens up a whole new world of interactions, but raises the specter of a security nightmare. Classic security solutions fail when faced with multitudes of devices running embedded software.

By Oliver Brdiczka - Computer World, Jun. 24, 2015 – 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives, and it will grow by orders of magnitude. However, the multitude of IoT devices with zero, limited or outdated security could produce disastrous results. It will be a formidable task to secure every small IoT device or toy. Security solutions that watch device behavior and identify anomalies might be our only hope.

The IoT is on the rise...

The genesis of IoT goes back to the early ?90s when PARC chief scientist Mark Weiser came up with the vision of Ubiquitous Computing and Calm Technology. In this vision, computing becomes "your quiet, invisible servant" and disappears from conscious actions and the environment of the user.

In recent years, smartphones, smartwatches, smart home appliances and more have brought us closer to that vision. The Internet of Things stresses the technology-focused aspect of this vision -- the idea of autonomous intercommunication of small Internet-enabled devices with the aim of learning and anticipating observable user behavior. While the IoT acronym has come into vogue recently, it is no new thing inside enterprise networks. IoT includes printers, phones, alarm systems, thermostats, CCTV cameras, etc. and thus has been around for a while now. However, when hitting the consumer market, according to the National Intelligence Council, IoT will be a disruptive technology by 2025. And by 2020, there will be tens of billions of Internet-enabled devices that generate global revenue of more than $8 trillion.

A good example for an IoT device that has hit the mass market is the Nest thermostat, transforming a traditional user-operated thermostat into an intelligent sensing device that adjusts the temperature based on observed user behavior.

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