Many of the current industry publications are covering the Internet of Things or IoT movement and for good reason. It is projected to have a profound impact on the way we live, work and interact with our world. There is little agreement about what all is included under the IoT title. Many believe, Internet connected televisions, appliances, sensors, connected cars, the entire machine-to- machine category and much more fall under that heading. One latest projection suggest that the IoT movement will have approximately 200 billion 'things' connected by 2020. This era of rapid technology advancement has been estimated at having an $11 trillion impact globally over the next ten years.
INTEL: In December 2013 a cyberattack was launched that targeted multiple household appliances including TVs and refrigerators.
All these connected devices have cyber security professionals concerned and for good reason. At this time it appears most of the IoT connected devices will not have cyber security protection such as firewalls and anti-virus software.
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Any way you look at it that is a significant amount of money. It is also a considerable increase in the number of unprotected devices connected to the Internet and that is substantially increasing our cyberattack surface. Earlier this year, a survey of consumers clearly highlighted the underlying issues here. Consumers were just about evenly split between those that feel the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks and those that take the opposite view. Less than 15 percent said they were unsure.
One thing that is sure is that this number of unprotected devices will only increase the cyber risks
