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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 Zinho on Friday December 23 2016, @03:02PM

    by Zinho (759) on Friday December 23 2016, @03:02PM (#445032)

    Yes, they did roll back the change that bricked 3rd party lights.

    No, Philips doesn't think that was the best solution. They are convinced that blocking 3rd party/non-"friends of Hue" products is the best solution and their corporate non-apology is very clear about that. They rolled it back after a wave of sharp, vocal criticism from first adopters with lots of social media influence called them out. Philips is on my "do not buy" list, right next to Sony, due to this shenanigan. Advertizing yourself as being an implementation of an open standard (ZigBee, in this case) and then transforming into an incompatible walled garden with no warning via software update is a Wheaton's Law violation.

    That said, I don't really fault Philips for excluding the Apple products. Apple is also attempting to build a walled-garden lighting ecosystem, intentionally incompatible with off-the-shelf components. And they'll get away with it, because they're Apple. Philips has no responsibility, neither to their own customers nor to Apple's, to interoperate with a system that isn't even trying to implement the same standard.

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