Abusing the Internet of Things

Chapter 8. Securely Enabling Our Future—A Conversation on Upcoming Attack Vectors

We’ve seen a whole range of new attack vectors and threat agents come into the technology landscape since the dawn of the Internet. Many of the threats have evolved in a fairly predictable way. But because the world around us has come to rely upon interconnected devices at an ever-increasing rate, it’s important for us to ponder the threats to our future.

So far, we have taken a look at vulnerabilities and security principles pertaining to specific devices. We’ve learned a lot about the state of security in IoT devices already in the consumer market. We know the things we are doing wrong today that we need to improve upon to securely enable the devices of the future.

Based on our knowledge of the evolving threat landscape as well as vulnerabilities that have plagued and continue to plague our computing systems and IoT devices, we stand on good ground to be able to predict scenarios that may come to pass. As the use cases served by IoT products evolve, new attack vectors will emerge. In this chapter, we will predict some plausible scenarios of attacks based upon our understanding of how IoT devices will serve our needs in the future.

The Thingbots Have Arrived

Botnets consist of groups of workstations and laptops that have been compromised and are controlled by the botnet owner. Most often the devices are infected by malware sent to the victim via email, by using a phishing website, or by software ...