On Friday, October 21, the internet suddenly plummeted into nightmare territory. All over the East Coast, then the rest of the country, then Europe, users were incapable of accessing thousands of websites and web apps. This included major sites like The New York Times, Spotify, Netflix, and Reddit. DNS provider Dyn had been hit with a DDoS attack.
Hackers flooded Dyn with coordinated, malicious traffic from millions of internet-connected devices. Many of these devices were webcams and digital recorders made by Chinese electronics firm Xiongmai. From the looks of it, this was a test. Whoever engineered the attacks wanted to see what type of havoc they could wreak through these devices. Its actually a very basic idea: take control of the IoT to create a traffic jam, then sit back and see how people deal with it. If this wasnt a test, the attacks would have been much more pointedor even more widespread, targeting multiple DNS providers.
We had to sit and wait for the attacks to clear up. Its yet to be seen how this affected enterprises that rely on SaaS. How much money did they lose due to lack of productivity? And whos liable for those losses? The culprits are invisible. Xiongmai is taking some flack. But that just results in product recalls. Ultimately, the people who lost money
enterprises, stock traders, marketers, and any other stakeholders in respective businessesmust throw their hands up, take the loss and hope it doesnt happen again. Sorry, Dyn; SaaS providers may want to look at getting an additional DNS.
In terms of liability, the IoT faces big concerns when it comes to industries such as trucking. CPW Law points out that self-driving trucks are already a thing of the present, and they represent a liability issue when it comes to wrecks. According to CPW, if an automated truck gets in a wreck, the person liable could be the manufactures. It could be the coders. It could be the designers. It could be almost anyone (a logistical nightmare), and as usual, the victim is the one who suffers.
With the Dyn DDoS attack, the victims are, of course, Dyn, but also the other organizations who lost money. But if hackers were to bring down a network of trucks, the victims would be people whose lives are at stake. Their families would suffer. And others would suffer, too. Employers suffer, the trucking industry suffers. This extends further.
Trucking companies are required to buy a Highway Use Tax bond, which guarantees theyll pay taxes for using our infrastructure to turn a profit. If networks of automated trucks fall prey to hacking schemes, companies wont see profits to help them pay for bonds and taxes. In turn, the American taxpayer suffers as trucking companies lean heavily on insurance and any available tax write-offs to cut their losses. Truckers lose their jobs. Prices for goods go up. The shockwaves are innumerable.
So far, we havent seen the IoT become a real liability. Although the internet went down for a while with the Dyn hack, weve yet to see shockwaves that really amount to something. But what we do have to look forward to (or worry about–your choice) is a very high-stakes stand-off between hackers and the worlds most powerful tech companies, with consumers left in the middle.
According to Kevin Ashton, the man who coined the term Internet of Things, self-driving cars will be all around us by 2030. Ashton counters the question about whether self-driving cars are safe by saying, Wrong question. Are human-driven cars safe? The answer is no.”
But this doesnt address the question of whether self-driving cars will be vulnerable to hacks. Google, for one, is working hard to make sure the answer is no. The search behemoths latest hardware releases are heavy on the AI were sure to see in its self-driving cars. Pixel and Home are both IoT devices that tap into Googles Assistant and Googles algorithm at large, with its artificial intelligence and its knowledge of your location, your searches, etc. There are already products out there like this, such as Apples iPhone and Amazons Echo. But investors remain confident in Googles intelligence.
To make self-driving cars truly viable, Google and others (such as Uber and Toyota) will have to make sure they can contend with attacks like the DDoS one we experienced. Hackers were able to take direct control of internet-connected devices. Self-driving cars will doubtlessly be bristling with security features to keep this from happening. But in the IoT, each deviceeach camera, each sensoron a self-driving car will be a potential portal for hacks. Will user-error, or manufacturer-error, leave these devices open to attacks? It doesnt take a stretch of the imagination to answer in the affirmative.
