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posted by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @09:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the Mirai-IoT-Botnet dept.

Canonical, maker of Ubuntu Linux and its Internet of Things variant, has discovered the obvious – that people cannot be trusted to secure their connected devices.

Thibaut Rouffineau, evangelist for Ubuntu Core and the Internet of Things, admitted late last week that developers and IoT device makers know people seldom update the firmware of connected devices. But, he argues, they probably don't realize how bad the security situation has become.

The distro maker says it surveyed 2,000 folks about how they dealt with connected devices. It found that less than a third of respondents (31 per cent) installed updates as soon as they were available. Some 40 per cent never knowingly updated their devices.

"In other words, consumers are leaving their devices open to exploits and hacks, from DDoS attacks to invasions of personal privacy or theft of personal data," said Rouffineau.

Why such disinterest? According to Rouffineau, almost two thirds of respondents felt that keeping software updated – their security – was not their responsibility.


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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:11PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:11PM (#444732)

    The failure here, is not with the end user, the consumer. The failure is that idiots are selling products with built in, totally unecessary vulnerabilities.

    If nobody was buying them, they wouldn't bother to make them. So the consumer does bear some responsibility.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:34PM (#444736)

    Not to mention supplying them with the wireless password. This shit doesn't happen to innocent victims. It happens to negligent idiots with too much money thinking it's all magic.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:51PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:51PM (#444762)

      To be fair, that's very much something computer companies are encouraging these days. "Just put the CD in and MAGIC!" No, it's not magic; it's a bunch of code that tries to plan for various contingencies, but it's not psychic, or magic, and it doesn't know perfectly what you want every time.

      You'd think it would be a better idea to have the thing prompt you for a password out of the box before it's usable. But impatient people would probably bitch about that, so instead we have thousands of people wide open to hacking.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:34PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:34PM (#444771) Journal
    The question is why people are buying them. Are they buying them because the manufacturers bundle services with them from people who pay them, making them cheaper than the dumb versions? Are they buying them because they see the word 'smart' and think that must be better than 'dumb'? Are they buying them because they actually want the features that they provide? Are they buying them because the shop doesn't have any dumb variants in stock? I'd guess that a very small percentage are buying them because they actually want the features and, of those, an even smaller proportion understand the negatives (obsolescence from lack of updates, attack surface on their home network, dependence on third-party services, and so on).
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    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:38PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:38PM (#444772)

      Are they buying them because the shop doesn't have any dumb variants in stock?

      Yeah, I wonder how much this is a factor. Like the last time I was looking to buy a car: huge lot and they had IIRC 4 manuals.

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