IoT security: What you should know, what you can do (free PDF)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is delivering big benefits to businesses and consumers, but it’s turning into a security nightmare. This ebook examines the latest threats and the measures organizations can take to protect themselves.
From the ebook:
The hottest trend in cyberattacks is an archaic and simplistic hacker tool. Propelled by the rise of IoT, the popularity of denial-of-service attacks rebounded in late 2016 and early 2017. Accompanying the rapid acceleration of the IoT and connected device market, warn cybersecurity experts, will be a zombie botnet swarm of network-crippling attacks.
Denial-of-service attacks are simple but effective weapons that bring down websites and services by flooding networks with junk traffic from commandeered botnets. Digital fallout will often incapacitate the target and ripple across the web to knock out unaffiliated but connected services and sites. “After an attack [clients] often feel angry and violated,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of denial-of-service mitigation service CloudFlare in an interview with TechRepublic. “A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is not a sophisticated attack. It’s the functional equivalent of a caveman with a club. But a caveman with a club can do a lot of damage.”
“DDoS outages are causing companies to completely rethink their cybersecurity strategies,” said cyber-defense strategist Terrence Gareau in a report by threat identification firm Nexusguard. Nexusguard examines network data to identify threat vector trends like duration, source, and variation of denial-of-service attacks. “Hackers’ preferences for botnets over reflection attacks are typical of cyclical behavior, where attackers will switch to methods that have fallen out of popularity to test security teams with unexpected vectors.”