How to Respect Privacy in the Age of IoT
You’ve entered someone’s smart home, but refuse to be listened to by their personal assistant? Can you ask your hosts to turn their Google Nest or Alexa off?
You’ve entered someone’s smart home, but refuse to be listened to by their personal assistant? Can you ask your hosts to turn their Google Nest or Alexa off?
The holiday season often leads to an increased risk of cybersecurity threats. You may notice an increase in offers coming to you via email, or online ads with attractive promotions for gifts, travel, etc. Unfortunately, some of these offers don’t turn out exactly what you ordered and paid for, so instead of saving money, you can be fooled and get into a situation of data theft, identity, or personal items. Therefore, when it comes to online security, here are the things you can do to protect yourself during the holiday season.
Speakers are everywhere, whether it’s expensive, standalone sound systems, laptops, smart home devices, or cheap portables. And while you rely on them for music or conversation, researchers have long known that commercial speakers are also physically able to emit frequencies outside of the audible range for humans. At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas held recently, one researcher is warning that this capability has the potential to be weaponized.
The Internet of Things (IoT) industry is growing rapidly with the number of IoT-connected devices projected to surpass 20 billion by 2020. It’s an amazing number, but a number that wouldn’t be possible without the concurrent growth and availability of WiFi and cellular. However, even with all this growth, industry leaders don’t believe existing WiFi and cellular capabilities can keep up with IoT’s trajectory.
If the first war was fought with sticks and stones, the next one likely will be fought with data. Cyber threats both big and small are increasing around the world, and they come with serious implications for governments and businesses that struggle to stay a step ahead of digital criminals.
The infrastructure around the world becomes more connected each day. We can thank the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for this connectedness, which stretches far beyond fitness bands to connecting machines and devices in industries such as transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, construction and more.
Traditional signature-based antivirus is notoriously bad at stopping newer threats such as zero-day exploits and ransomware, but it still has a place in the enterprise, experts say, as part of a multi-layer endpoint security protection strategy. The best antivirus products act as the first layer of defense, stopping the vast majority of malware attacks and leaving the broader endpoint protection software with a smaller workload to deal with.
Threat detection and response is difficult and only getting more complicated. One of the primary reasons is that many organizations approach threat detection and response through a maze of disconnected point tools. In fact, ESG research indicates that 66% of organizations agree that threat detection/response effectiveness is limited because it is based upon multiple independent point tools. But, by all accounts, integration is the key. See how in this infographic!
They just don’t quit, do they? Hackers and scammers are continuing to baffle security experts as they antagonize innocent folks across the internet. They’re continuously changing tactics and approaches in the hopes of evading authorities – which has the effect of unleashing new threats and obstacles that researchers and engineers are forced to overcome.
According to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, espionage-related cyber attacks are growing in popularity, with malware and phishing still go-to tools for hackers as well.
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