Late last month, popular websites like Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and PayPal went down for most of a day. The distributed denial-of-service attack that caused the outages, and the vulnerabilities that made the attack possible, was as much a failure of market and policy as it was of technology. If we want to secure our increasingly computerized and connected world, we need more government involvement in the security of the "Internet of Things" and increased regulation of what are now critical and life-threatening technologies. It's no longer a question of if, it's a question of when.
First, the facts. Those websites went down because their domain name provider — a company named Dyn — was forced offline. We don't know who perpetrated that attack, but it could have easily been a lone hacker. Whoever it was launched a distributed denial-of-service attack against Dyn by exploiting a vulnerability in large numbers — possibly millions — of Internet-of-Things devices like webcams and digital video recorders, then recruiting them all into a single botnet. The botnet bombarded Dyn with traffic, so much that it went down. And when it went down, so did dozens of websites.
Your security on the Internet depends on the security of millions of Internet-enabled devices, designed and sold by companies you've never heard of to consumers who don't care about your security.
The technical reason these devices are insecure is complicated, but there is a market failure at work. The Internet of Things is bringing computerization and connectivity to many tens of millions of devices worldwide. These devices will affect every aspect of our lives, because they're things like cars, home appliances, thermostats, lightbulbs, fitness trackers, medical devices, smart streetlights and sidewalk squares. Many of these devices are low-cost, designed and built offshore, then rebranded and resold. The teams building these devices don't have the security expertise we've come to expect from the major computer and smartphone manufacturers, simply because the market won't stand for the additional costs that would require. These devices don't get security updates like our more expensive computers, and many don't even have a way to be patched. And, unlike our computers and phones, they stay around for years and decades.
Is government regulation the only way to get manufacturers of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to care about security?
(Score: 1) by trimtab on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:49PM
The problem is that the "so called" balanced approach will absolutely lead to more DDOS attacks for IoT devices. It costs money to develop, audit, and maintain secure firmware/software properly. There is NO incentive to spend that extra money without government penalties for failure to do so, so closed software will almost NEVER be fixed. Open Source software at least allows customers or others to audit and improve the result and if you are a hardware maker it would be a marketing and sales win.
Of course, most CPUs, GPUs and SoCs require NDAs and closed sourced BLOBs of binary *crap* to even be included in products. We need some smart hardware maker to figure out that "open and secure" is the best path and that will NOT occur without substantial financial penalties for producing insecure devices.
So a Government imposed penalty is absolutely necessary. A Government mandate on a specific solution is not. However, the "open source" option would be a "low cost" way for new players to enter the market without the costs of paying for proprietary reviews which may or may not prevent future takeovers of their products. And at least with Open Source the customers (or experts they can hire) can fix the problem with the equipment even if the company that created the hardware goes belly up.
We need no more Oracles or Microsofts, particularly in IoT.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:49AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!