Japan is Hacking its Own Citizens
Have a smart speaker, doorbell camera, webcam, or even an internet connected refrigerator? If you do, you’re part of the Internet of Things (IoT), a term that describes the many online devices that have multiplied throughout our lives over the past several years. While many of these devices are great time-savers and efficiency-creators, they contain vulnerabilities that aren’t often accounted for by average citizens.
You certainly wouldn’t want just anyone to be able to hack in to your devices, but what about your government? Japan intends to do just that. This isn’t something like NSA monitoring or some deep state conspiracy. CNN reports that Japan is going to test these devices to find out just how vulnerable its citizens are to cyber attacks.
The Japanese said that in 2016, 2/3 of cyber attacks were aimed at IoT devices and they’d like to test their vulnerabilities in part because of the upcoming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. Japan is going to test both networks that have no security, and those that use common passwords (please change your password from ‘password).
Internet connected devices are becoming ubiquitous, with the research company Gartner projecting that there will be more than 20 billion active devices by the year 2020. What was once a problem for some will soon be a problem for all as systems like lighting and heating move toward increased connectivity.
Obviously, hackers gaining access to these devices allows for an extreme invasion of privacy. There are even sites that livestream video from compromised devices. The other massive vulnerability lies in using these devices for distributed denial of service attacks. Rather than compromising computers to overpower websites and ISPs, hackers are now using smart devices to coordinate these attacks, shutting down portions of the internet with comparative ease.
The responsibility of protecting a home network and the devices within it lies with the users. It’s difficult for companies to be held liable in instances of hacking, so it’s important to remain vigilant with security.
Extract places a great deal of focus on security. We keep your sensitive data behind your firewall and work with you on your security requirements. We know the importance of keeping personally identifiable information out of the public eye and can help improve the accuracy of your redaction or data indexing workflows. If you’d like to learn more about how we keep data safe, please reach out today.
