IoT technology is growing at a dangerously fast pace. Digitally connected devices are touching every aspect of our lives, including our homes, offices, and cars. But, as with every good thing, there is also a downside to IoT.

With the increase in the number of digitally connected devices, more data is being collected, which in turn is increasing the attack vectors. Attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in IoT devices to steal our sensitive data and invade our privacy. But how can we prevent that? How can we ensure the security of the sensitive data collected from us by IoT devices? Let’s examine in more detail the security concerns of IoT devices and how best to address them.

Security Concerns of IoT

Cybercriminals can attack IoT devices in a number of ways. They can exploit vulnerabilities in insecure web interfaces, cloud interfaces, and lack of encryption, or they can take advantage of weak authentication mechanisms to enumerate user accounts, steal sensitive data, or launch DoS attacks. Let’s understand each of them in more detail.

Insecure Authentication

If the authentication mechanism is not secure enough, attackers can exploit that to gain unauthorized access to user accounts and steal sensitive data. There are a number of ways that can happen. For example,

• If default usernames and passwords are not changed properly, attackers can exploit that to gain unauthorized access to user accounts.
• Attackers can exploit weak passwords to gain unauthorized access to the devices.
• If the collected user credentials are not encrypted properly, attackers can exploit them and capture them maliciously.
• Attackers can enumerate user accounts to access the IoT devices.

This can undoubtedly lead to data loss or corruption. It can even result in denial of access or complete device takeover.

Prevention

We can take a couple of steps to prevent this type of attack:

• Make sure to change default credentials at the time of the initial setup of the devices.
• Passwords need to be kept sufficiently strong. Users should not be allowed to set weak passwords. (How to create a strong password?)
• Credentials should be encrypted using a sufficiently strong encryption algorithm whenever they are collected from users. Plaintext credentials should never be transmitted across the network.
• Account lockout should be implemented so that the user account gets locked immediately after a certain number of failed login attempts.
• We need to make sure password recovery mechanisms are made secure.
• We need to make sure, when a device is plugged into the network, it authenticates itself before it starts sending or receiving data.

Vulnerable Web Interfaces, Mobile Interfaces, and Cloud Interfaces

Attackers can exploit insecure web interfaces, mobile interfaces, and cloud interfaces to steal …