A world of Hyper connected IoT devices means it can harm people in many serious ways. Every smart device is a computer. Ovens are IoT smart devices that make things hot, refrigerators are smart devices that keep things cold. These Hyper connected Devices from home thermostats to chemical plants are all online. Anyhow with access to the Internet can now sense and touch the physical and Virtual world comprising of Billion Devices all Intra and Inter connected in the scheme of IoT.
With Hyper Connected IoT Systems enabling us facilities with modern Technological Innovation like driver less cars, smart cities, and personal agents equipped with their own behavioral algorithms, there are also loopholes in the code and pitfalls the software where anyone or hackers with proper abilities can virtually hack entire Hyper connected systems and cause irrevocable damage to the Nation, security of people, Loss of data through theft and many many more unimaginable things.
All Hyper connected Devices can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Cutting-edge digital Hackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid. The challenges in designing and deploying large-scale Hyper connected IoT solutions are enormous due to the rigidity, poor elasticity and limited dependability of traditional products.
Traditional IoT solutions are rigid and inflexible because they are specifically designed to solve a problem and are not designed for flexible customization, utility-oriented delivery and these IoT devices are not built to respond and scale dynamically to respond to varying load requirements. The availability, reliability, and maintainability of traditional IoT solutions is not up to the mark to meet the dynamic expectations and The heterogeneity and large scale geographical distribution of large-scale IoT solutions weaken traditional security and management tools, rendering them ineffective.
The need to meet pressing business challenges, along with the lower cost and ease of deployment of line-of-business technology solutions, has created friction between business leads and IT—friction that can put the success of an IoT solution at risk. Business leads must recognize that IT has well-founded concerns about the technical challenges involved in executing on your IoT project. And IT should embrace the need for greater agility to help the business thrive and meet its goals.
Smart Sensors used in our Hyper connected IoT environment collect extremely sensitive information which can be breached and there should be a strong measures to ensure security and privacy. As a centralized resource out of users’ control, the IoT becomes an opportunity to violate privacy exploited by adversaries and hackers and steal data for various malicious purposes.
Scalability of Hyper connected IoT System will be more challenging than web-scale or Internet-scale applications; the amount of data generated will easily exceed the reported trillion objects and bandwidth requirements for a centralized IoT cloud solution are staggering, especially since most data acquired by IoT devices should be processed locally.
Shipping data to the cloud requires a significant amount of upload traffic. Broadband networks have more downstream bandwidth than upstream bandwidth. IoT applications generate data that will easily saturate the upstream link’s bandwidth especially at scale. IoT developers need to address this issue. IoT applications where a fan is turned on or off in response to a rise of the local temperature, will experience unpredictable latencies from sensing, wireless transmission, gateway processing, Internet delivery, and cloud processing.
IoT users experience variable latency and occasional loss of web services and the temporary unavailability of sensors or actuators within IoT applications will directly impact the physical world. Sensor data is ephemeral and it should durable against global disasters. There is no effective way of verifying the data has been completely destroyed because the cloud is out of the user’s control.
Cyber criminals are working on new techniques for getting through the security of established organizations, accessing everything from IP to individual customer information so that they can cause damage, steal sensitive data and steal intellectual property. They are the most dangerous threat to the emergence and effective world wide implementation of Hyper connected IoT systems.
Every day, their attacks become more sophisticated and harder to defeat. we cannot predict what kind of threats will emerge next year, in five years’ time, or in 10 years’ time and hence we have to be ready and innovative in predicting new threats as we can only say that these threats will be even more dangerous than those of today. We can also be certain that as old sources of this threat recede, new sources will emerge to take their place.
It’s important to remember that cyber security is a business-wide issue and not just a technology risk. Since many opportunities for IoT will arise through technological integration and collaboration, which will continue to increase in complexity — this complexity invites huge risk. Effective cyber security is increasingly complex to deliver.
The Normal Organization’s security defenses are becoming redundant and useless under with new Kind of Cyber threats emerging each year. Antivirus software solutions, firewalls, patching and encryption of data in networks, remain a key control for combating today’s known attacks; however, they become less effective over time as hackers find new ways to exploit new loop holes.
The adoption of mobile computing has resulted in blurring organizational boundaries, with IT getting closer to the user and further from the organization. The use of the internet via smart phones and tablets in combination with BYOD strategies by employers has made an organization’s data accessible everywhere and at any time, which accompanies the case of potential data risks and thefts.
One compromised vulnerable device exploited by hacker can lead to other vulnerable devices, and it is almost impossible to patch all the vulnerabilities for all the devices. For the Hackers, it won’t be hard to find a IoT target for their attack. The Hyper connected IoT space will be vast and so will be the number of victims affected by botnets, rootkits, will be vast and so would be the number of victims.
It is easier for an attacker to plant a “Trojan” in a phone, if the phone is connected to the computer which has already been compromised. With Millions of devices connected, it will be even easier for a cyber criminal to cause damage to multiple systems almost simultaneously. Machines or devices will be help people in performing most of their tasks, but consider the scenario when somebody hacks into any of our smart devices.
In a recent event, the hackers hacked into a baby monitor and after having a good look around at their way in and way out through the camera, they broke into the house. Finding loopholes to enter any network will be easier for any attacker since there will be so many ways to attack into critical infrastructures, such as power generation and transportation systems and other automation systems powered by IoT Hyper connections.
Mobile Apps that run on mobile devices are a daily necessity in our daily lives without which there wouldn’t be normal functioning of a day. From mapping apps, to social networking, to productivity tools, to games, apps have largely driven the smart phone revolution and have made it as significant and as far-reaching as it is today. Mobile apps have exhibited utility usefulness that is only bound only by developer imagination, it also increases the risk of supporting BYOD devices in a corporate environment.
As the organization enables employees to bring their own devices, the need for using the same devices to access work-related data inevitably presents itself. This presents security risks such as Malicious apps (malware) where the increase in the number of apps on the device increases the likelihood that some may contain malicious code or security holes.
With most employees now owning mobile devices, organizations have been exploiting the fact that their employees increasingly want to use their own personal mobile devices to conduct work in cheaper mode but BYOD significantly affects and weakens traditional security models of protecting the security defense and protocols of the IT organization by blurring its definition , both in terms of physical location and in asset ownership. A futuristic innovative methods must be defined to nullify these risks and to ensure that the security and reliable usability of the devices in an Organization is ensured .
Cloud computing is a prerequisite for IoT. The cloud is an integral setup for IoT to prosper but, there are many challenges which we face today when it comes to cloud security or data security in the cloud. IT Organizations are discovering too late that their cloud provider’s standards of security don’t meet their necessary implementation organizational standards.
These are the incidents which have led to call these services as single point of hack, instead of a single point of storage. With Big Data becoming Big nowadays in every organizational setup, there will be an enormous amount of data produced for the service providers as well. With the Huge amounts of Terabytes data that is generated, the storage servers should be updated with new security protocols .
There will be an increase in risks and failures of communication setups, as the sensors and smart devices will be transferring sensitive personal information all the time on the links and channels. With our data stored on cloud services, there is also a risk of increase in spam as the cloud servers are virtually moved from one geographic location to another in a matter of minutes.
Smart phones which have developed apps with IoT functionalities and access to various smart sensors installed on various Hyper connected IoT devices in our home have become an integral part of our lives with daily usage and we depend on them to hold significant information, such as our home address, credit card details, personal photos/videos, e-mail accounts, official documents, contact numbers and messages.
The information stored on our devices will include the places that we visit frequently and a “pattern” that uniquely identifies us, so anyone who can hack into any of these devices can harm us to any extent possible in many ways. The loss of a single smart device not only means the loss of information, but increasingly it also leads to a loss of identity (identity theft).
The internet knows no rules expect those protocols defined by Designers and developers to Transfer Data and acknowledge them and hence all devices cannot have the same firmware, hardware or software running on them. Hardware from different companies might not support each other fully due to different software codes and design requirements and thus it might lead to interoperability issues of devices.
The tremendous exponential increase in the number of devices can also be a problem as the vulnerabilities that they are associated with will spread very rapidly. With thousands of vendors across the globe, it will be very difficult for the network engineers to patch these vulnerabilities,
especially with thousands of new patches to update daily. IoT network engineers will now have devices many fold higher in magnitude communicating to their servers outside the network. Organized cyber criminals will be able to sell hardware with Trojans or back doors already installed in them, and with the help of these vulnerabilities, they will hunt other victims and make a Botnet out of it.
These devices, scattered all around the world, will be perfect for a DDOS attack on any of the servers, since sensors don’t have antivirus software apps installed in them but they could be feature implementation that can be mandated in future with necessary hardware capabilities to afford the antivirus software installed in all the smart devices connected through Hyper connected IoT Systems.
The operational and financial challenges associated with growth can be challenging to IT Organizations trying to incorporate IoT solutions. As IoT technology grows,the scale of operations grows exponentially. Without enabling resources and technology like Data Storage, Organization and Management, Application Building and Enablement, User Interface Security and Analytics, the IoT deployment is at risk for outages, data loss, redundancy, higher costs, and disorganized payment processes to multiple providers.
The Pit Falls of Hyper connected IoT systems are huge and many to just compactly discuss it in the few thousand words when we dig deeper into the implementation and methodologies and intricacies of the system measuring various parameters and protocols necessary for proper smooth uninterrupted functioning of Hyper connected systems. We need to address them all.
The Negatives and Cons of Hyper Connected IoT Systems and its smart devices, interfaces and applications will far outweigh its advantages if proper necessary precautionary and evolutionary measures are not taken well before in time, rather than waiting for damage control when a wide scale Cyber attack happens which will cause irrevocable damage to the systems. It will have a chain reaction like a ripple effect where when one device or system is affected by hackers and adversaries, rest of the Inter connected smart devices will be affected, compromised and prone to several cyber attacks in the future if proper necessary measures to quarantine neutralize and nullify the threats caused by the wide scale cyber attacks to the compromised inter connected devices of the Hyper Connected IoT system.
The Users will be the most affected and their sensitive personal data affecting the personal lives, Financial Transactions, Data theft, Identity theft make them vulnerable to be prone to more such attacks in future where the Leaked Data can be viciously used for malicious purposes harming the individuals. If the malicious and dangerous hackers control the automobile devices inter connected to IoT, then the very life of the people using them could be in danger.
The Organizations cannot ignore the Hyper Connected Futuristic IoT Ecosystem which drives entire innovation, Data, Traffic and People using these systems interconnected to these Hyper Connected devices and systems as well as other people who are connected to the IoT system interfaces and smart devices but if they over look and do not take proper measures to develop a model to run Hyper connected IoT systems in a sustained smooth and uninterrupted manner, Then the future of not only Hyper Connected IoT system is an danger, but also each and every person who uses it will have to face severe consequences.
