siliconindia | | November 20188CYBER SECURITY IN THE IoT AGEBy Shashank Bajpai, Chief Information Security Officer, ACKO General InsuranceHeadquartered in Mumbai, ACKO General Insurance offers a diverse range of insurance services that include Car & Bike Insurance, Ola Insurance, Mobile Insurance, and many others.IN MY OPINIONW e have very much entered into a new era of the Internet of Things (IoT) Age. IoT is everywhere around us; from Smart Homes, Smart Cars, Smart Devices to Control Systems in Manufacturing Industry & Point of Sale (PoS) Devices at various locations. These are all inter-connected and constitute the ever-growing reach of IoT. As far as the reach of the Internet of Things, there are more than 12 billion devices that can currently connect to the Internet, and researchers at IDC estimate that by 2020, there will be 26 times more connected things than people. According to Gartner, consum-er applications will drive the number of connected things, while enterprise will account for most of the revenue. IoT adoption is growing, with manufacturing and utilities estimated to have the largest installed base of Things by 2020.IoT technology is enabling both ease of access and ease of usage, and harnessing the technolog-ical evolution in telecommunication and driving financial inclusion. On similar lines, IoT Security is also evolving with new technologies & control processes deployed to secure the IoT. Hackers and fraudsters are also capitalizing on this new arena, with numerous security breaches dominating the headlines lately. It has already been revealed that internet-connected televisions can be used to se-cretly record conversations, microwave cameras are being used for surveillance, and also, end us-ers are no more immune to IoT attacks, with 96 percent of security professionals responding to a new survey expecting an increase in IoT breaches this year.Even if end users personally don't suffer the consequences of the sub-par security of the IoT, the connected gadgets may well be unwittingly cooperating with criminals. Last October, Inter-net service provider Dyn came under an attack that disrupted access to popular websites. The cybercriminals who initiated the attack managed to commandeer a large number of internet-con-nected devices (mostly DVRs and cameras) to serve as their helpers. A recently released research
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