Understanding Cyberrisks in IoT

Chapter 3

Vulnerability Assessments and Hacking Experiments—The Risk Is There, Just Waiting for a Hacker with Enough Motivation

Introduction

In the year 2013, former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney asked doctors to disable the wireless connection capabilities of his pacemaker out of fear of a life-threatening cyberattack. Although at first sight this could seem a little paranoid, this is far from impossible. Actually, according to The Guardian, in 2017 over 500,000 pacemakers were recalled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) owing to fears of being victims of a remote attack (Hern 2017). In the previous chapter, real-life attack cases were described in order to give the reader an idea of how IoT cyberrisks have proven to be real. Nevertheless, ...