A connected world will be a playground for hackers

This article, published in The Economist, explores the impacts of the increasing pervasiveness of IoT devices on cybersecurity. The article starts off by giving several examples of how these IoT devices were used as a stepping stone to bring down bigger software systems such as a casino being hacked through their internet connected fish tank in 2017 or national internet traffic being hampered by a DDoS attack on internet routing information from a massive botnet of compromised IoT devices. The article claims that events like these have caused security worries to turn into the single biggest barrier for companies thinking of adopting IoT technologies. Because of this, security has now turned into a major selling point for the services provided by big computing firms with companies such as Microsoft and Intel, marketing their products as more secure out of the bag so that individual companies don’t have to spend as much time and effort implementing their own security. Finally, the article ends in a brief discussion on the possibility of holding software companies liable for producing bad quality code that can be easily hacked, an extremely controversial topic that will have to enter the conversation in the near future.