Yes, two Internet of Things posts in one day. This post will look at two stories that have emerged over the last day and a half.
One being that Google acquired Nest and the other that The Internet of Things is already getting hacked.
MediaPost covered why Google wanted Nest, in their article “The Internet of Things is out of the Nest”
Observers yesterday were pondering why Google “wants a $3.2 billion thermostat?” as Lex’s Robert Armstrong asked Financial Times reporter Joseph Cotterill about the company’s purchase of Nest Labs Monday — knowing full well that his answer would delve into the huge potential of “The Internet of Things.”
Cotterill responds with two cautionary words: “Internet fridge” circa 1998.
“Samsung and LG would sell you these refrigerators which would tell you when your milk was running out, as if you were somehow incapable of looking into [it] yourself,” Cotterill reminds us. “And so that kinda really bombed.”
The difference today is that the market is much bigger and wider and smarter than it was when those devices were introduced.
“The networking giant Cisco predicts a world where 50 billion devices could be connected to the Internet by 2020,” writes Avi Itzkovitch in the September issue of Ux Magazine. “Collectively, this Internet of Things will be able to provide cloud-enabled experiences that could profoundly change many aspects of everyday life, both in and out of the home.”
Read that full article here
Read Write did a post about an hour ago entitled: “The Internet Of Things Has Been Hacked, And It’s Turning Nasty” This article highlights that amongst all the hype and potential, we better have people on top of securing all these sensor and controllers. A lot of people need to get up to speed on this stuff and fast as a lot of bad can possibly come from IOT no matter how great John Chambers (Cisco) thinks it is.
From the article:
Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Bad guys have already hijacked up to 100,000 devices in the Internet of Things and used them to launch malware attacks, Internet security firm Proofpoint said on Thursday.
It’s apparently the first recorded large-scale Internet of Things hack. Proofpoint found that the compromised gadgets—which included everything from routers and smart televisions to at least one smart refrigerator—sent more than 750,000 malicious emails to targets between December 26, 2013 and January 6, 2014.
The hack came to light over the relatively quiet holiday period when a security researcher at Proofpoint noticed a spike in thousands of malicious messages sent from a range of IP addresses she didn’t recognize, David Knight, a Proofpoint executive in charge of information security products, told me in an interview.
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