Creating a well thought out home design that incorporates the smart home technology that your customers want is becoming increasingly difficult because of the fracturing of the market. More products and more options that don't always speak to each other create a difficult equation.
Here the challenges are explored.
Key value propositions for consumers around the smart home are noted as more security, more safety, and easy management of home solutions for communication and controls in the home. Really, the promise of the connected home hinges on the security, safety, and simplicity of protecting this advanced technology from being exploited to harm households.
In 2017, the connected home market has experienced an expansion of the kinds of attacks that have been increasing in recent years.
Attacks include:
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks—like the largest-ever October 2016 Mirai botnet attack—will target devices where default password usage provides easy unauthorized access. Ransom attacks, using DDoS as a threat to an organization or ransomware targeting individual consumers, are predicted to continue seeking to extort payment by hijacking control of devices.
Permanent Denial of Service (PDoS) attacks, as known as phlashing, seek to destroy the firmware and permanently render IoT devices inoperable. Malicious impact without particular rewards has been enough motive for some hackers.
Man-in-the-middle attacks often exploit router or device setup vulnerabilities to gain access to data traffic moving to and from devices on the home network.
Phishing scams, increasingly difficult to identify, lure consumers onto fake websites that solicit their login credentials to fix an imaginary problem. According to The Anti-Phishing Workgroup, almost 100,000 email phishing attacks are reported each month. Thousands of people fall for them, divulging sensitive personal and business information in the process.
Investment in data privacy and security by stakeholders in the consumer IoT ecosystem has never been greater. However, vulnerabilities still exist and are highlighted in the news regularly. Parks Associates research finds that nearly one-half of consumers cite strong data security and privacy concerns related to Internet-connected devices. Read More
