Home / IT & Computer Science / Cyber Security / Introduction to Network Security and Defence / The internet of things
The internet of things
The role of the individual in cyber security.
Now we’re going to talk about the internet of things, which you might see as IoT, and just how they will begin to increase over and over, over time and how they will affect maybe your daily lives, but there’s also a risk to businesses. So we’ll start with what an IoT device is. It can be anything from a doorbell that sits on your house that has a camera on there and it provides video that feeds back maybe to a cloud system and you link a phone to that and you can see exactly what’s happening at your house at any time. So you can start to see how this takes advantage of cloud-based solutions.
But there is a lot of cyber risks with IoT. Let’s take a smart home. So a lot of you out there are probably starting to put things into your house such as light bulbs that you can talk to. You then might have smart blinds, that go up and down when you tell them to. You may have things like fridges that tell you when you’re out of milk. But, ultimately all these things connect to your wifi network at some stage and they may even be controlled by voice-activated systems such as Amazon Alexa. So the broadcast for your wifi network is generally quite far outside of your house.
If somebody got access to your wifi network and they had a malicious intent and joined your network, they are immediately able to access some of these services. Now some of them might be secured in different ways and they might be completely secure, you can’t get into them. But if you take a fridge that had a vulnerability that this hacker, would-be hacker, was able to get into that fridge which then could be used as a bridge to attack another service such as Alexa Voice which said ‘open an automated garage door’, for example. Or even your car - it’s certainly possible today with mobile phones and voice. So how do we stop that? Well the answer is you can’t.
I mean there’s a bit of common sense that needs to be needs to be input into these devices. Normally they’re provided to you in a certain way, but you have to configure a lot of the settings. So, for example, do you want to do automatic ordering of things like eggs and milk? Maybe that’s something that you say I don’t want to do that because it’s linking to another service that is nothing to do with that fridge. It might be something that just alerts your phone. But as these things evolve they would begin to make their way into the business. So the cyber element of this is today there isn’t really an Alexa for business, it’s coming soon in the UK.
But when this is sitting on your desk in your corporate world, your corporate environment and you start to link things like access to doors, starting audio conferencing systems, there may be an element of risk that we need to consider. And this is an area of growth that is going to become a higher level of cyber security risk and especially when it becomes part of your wifi network and network defence management systems.
To fully appreciate the human/social aspect of cyber security, we need to consider this at an individual level.
In the video, Steve Rogers demonstrates how your life, through the interconnectivity of your devices, could be hacked. He also mentions that this may soon be a problem that businesses need to look into.
Your task
Think about the behaviours of the people in your household: how could their behaviour put you more or less at risk of being hacked?Now scale that up. In a business or indeed at the state level, how can the behaviours of individuals influence the risk of a cyber attack?How can we defend against cyber attacks when everyone and everything is interconnected through cyber space?Discuss your thoughts in the comments.
This article is from the online course:
Introduction to Network Security and Defence
Created by
This article is from the free online
Introduction to Network Security and Defence
Reach your personal and professional goals
Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.
Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.
