Need For IoT Security Is Real

The need for security solutions around the Internet of Things took center stage in October, with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that hit Internet performance management company Dyn. The attack affected its Managed Domain Name Servers (DNS) customers and caused widespread internet outages across the East Coast, impacting prominent sites such as Amazon.com, Twitter and Spotify.  The attack came largely from devices infected by the Mirai botnet – malware that spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords. Solution providers at the time said the DDoS attack validated and deepened the industry's concerns over the security risk posed by the Internet of Things.