This is the Shared Security Weekly Blaze for March 19, 2018 sponsored by Security Perspectives – Your Source for Tailored Security Awareness Training and Assessment Solutions. This episode was hosted by Tom Eston.
Show Transcript
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for March 19th 2018 with your host, Tom Eston.
In this week’s episode: The Insecure Internet of Things, Spectre Patch Updates and Android Malware.
Hi everyone, I’m Tom Eston, Co-host of the Shared Security podcast. Welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze where we update you on the top 3 security and privacy topics from the week. These weekly podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.
Shout outs this week to @Yohun, @ClarkWillClark, @drheleno_ca and @eg0sum on Twitter as well as @heath_robinson on Instagram and Tom, Shawn and Jamie on Facebook for commenting, liking and sharing our posts on social media. Thank you for your support!
A new paper called the “Secure by Design Report” from the UK government’s Department for Culture Media and Sport describes 13 new security guidelines for manufactures of Internet of Things devices ( also abbreviated as IoT). If you’ve have been listening to past episodes of the podcast or have been paying attention to the news, we’ve seen a huge increase in devices such as smart watches, Internet enabled camera’s and hundreds of other connected devices like coffee machines and even toasters. Yes, you can actually buy a connected toaster that you can control from your mobile phone just in case you want to really fine tune your toasting process.
Over the last several years Internet of Things devices have been found to have many different kinds of security vulnerabilities such as being configured with default passwords, having no mechanism to be updated and the lack of features to delete private data. In fact, insecure devices like these have been hacked to steal information and can be hijacked to be used in botnets, like the Marai botnet in 2016, that infected over 300,000 IoT devices with malware. These new guidelines aim to educate manufactures so they can build and eventually sell secure products.
I think these guidelines are a great start to advocate good security practices for IoT device manufactures, however, guidelines are just guidelines. Will manufactures listen to this advice or will they continue to sell devices that are easily hackable. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to determine if the IoT device that you’re purchasing is secure or not. From what we’ve seen in the past, many of these new IoT products are cheaply made with the purpose of getting cool technology out to the market to make a quick sale. In fact, it’s really easy to do a quick search on Amazon for pretty much any “connected” device these days to find manufactures or sellers that no one has ever heard of.
One tip I’ve found helpful is to check reviews and comments left by owners of products that you may be interested in purchasing to find out if any security or privacy configurations are being discussed or if there are known security issues that the manufacture is aware of and is addressing. Like these guidelines state, it’s up to the device manufactures to bear the burden of securing their products. For us consumers we either need to accept the risk that these products may compromise our security and privacy or just not purchase these devices all together. I mean, it’s still possible to make toast with a regular toaster and not a connected one.
Published on 7 years, 9 months ago
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