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STEPS FORWARD: Regulators are on the move to set much needed IoT security rules of the road

By Byron V. Acohido

New government rules coupled with industry standards meant to give formal shape to the Internet of Things (IoT) are rapidly quickening around the globe.

Preserving privacy for a greater good

This is to be expected. After all, government mandates combined with industry standards are the twin towers of public safety. Without them the integrity of our food supplies, the efficacy of our transportation systems and reliability of our utilities would not be what they are.

When it comes to IoT, we must arrive at specific rules of the road if we are to tap into the full potential of smart cities, autonomous transportation and advanced healthcare.

In the absence of robust, universally implemented rules of the road, cybercriminals will continue to have the upper hand and wreak even more havoc than they now do. Threat actors all-too-readily compromise, disrupt and maliciously manipulate the comparatively simple IoT systems we havein operation today.

I had an eye-opening conversation about all of this with Steve Hanna, distinguished engineer at Infineon Technologies, a global semiconductor manufacturer based in Neubiberg, Germany. We went over how governments around the world are stepping up their efforts to impose IoT security legislation and regulations designed to keep users safe.

This is happening at the same time as tech industry consortiums are

Comment | Read | September 5th, 2023 | For consumers | For technologists | Steps forward | Top Stories | Videos

MY TAKE: As network perimeters shift and ecosystems blend, the role of MSSPs solidifies

By Byron V. Acohido

Deepening interoperability of AI-infused systems – in our buildings, transportation grids, communications systems and medical equipment — portend amazing breakthroughs for humankind.

Related: The coming of optical infrastructure

But first businesses must come to grips with the quickening convergence of their internal and external computing resources. And that’s no small task.

I had the chance to discuss this with Shinichi Yokohama, NTT Global CISO and John Petrie, Counselor to the NTT Global CISO, at RSA Conference 2023. It was a rare opportunity to get the perspective of senior executives responsible for protecting a Fortune 100 global enterprise.

We discussed how the boundaries between in-company and out-of-company IT infrastructure have become increasingly blurred making network security more challenging than ever. For a full drill, please view the accompanying videocast. Here are a few takeaways:

A converged ecosystem

Cloud migration and rapid software development were both on a rising curve when Covid 19 hit and the global economy suddenly shut down in 2020. As companies adjusted in the post pandemic operating environment, Internet-centric services rose to the fore.

This accelerated the convergence of on-premises and cloud-hosted IT infrastructure. Today, data storage and processing power are prominently

Comment | Read | July 19th, 2023 | Best Practices | For technologists | Podcasts | Top Stories | Videos

MY TAKE: ‘IOWN’ makes the business case for fostering diversity, respecting individual privacy

By Byron V. Acohido

To tap the full potential of massively interconnected, fully interoperable digital systems we must solve privacy and cybersecurity, to be sure.

Preserving privacy for a greater good

But there’s yet another towering technology mountain to climb: we must also overcome the limitations of Moore’s Law.

After 30 years, we’ve reached the end of Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a silicon-based semiconductor chip doubles approximately every 18 months. In short, the mighty integrated circuit is maxed out.

Last spring, I attended NTT Research’s Upgrade 2023 conference in San Francisco and heard presentations by scientists and innovators working on what’s coming next.

I learned how a who’s who list of big tech companies, academic institutions and government agencies are hustling to, in essence,

Comment | Read | July 10th, 2023 | For consumers | For technologists | My Take | Steps forward | Top Stories | Videos

MY TAKE: The role of semiconductors in bringing the ‘Internet of Everything’ into full fruition

By Byron V. Acohido

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is on the near horizon.

Related: Raising the bar for smart homes

Our reliance on artificially intelligent software is deepening, signaling an era, just ahead, of great leaps forward for humankind.

We would not be at this juncture without corresponding advances on the hardware side of the house. For instance, very visibly over the past decade, Internet of Things (IoT) computing devices and sensors have become embedded everywhere.

Not as noticeably, but perhaps even more crucially, big advances have been made in semiconductors, the chips that route electrical current in everything from our phones and laptops to automobile components and industrial plant controls.

I recently visited with Thomas Rosteck, Division President of Connected Secure Systems (CSS) at Infineon Technologies, a global semiconductor manufacturer based in Neubiberg, Germany. We discussed how the Internet of Things, to date, has been all about enabling humans to leverage smart devices for personal convenience.

“What has changed in just the past year is that things are now starting to talk to other things,” Rosteck observes. “Smart devices and IoT systems are beginning to interconnect with each other and this is only going to continue.”

3 Comments | Read | December 12th, 2022 | For technologists | My Take | Steps forward | Top Stories | Videos

MY TAKE: Why the Matter smart home standard portends the coming of the Internet of Everything

By Byron V. Acohido

Standards. Where would we be without them?

Universally accepted protocols give us confidence that our buildings, utilities, vehicles, food and medicines are uniformly safe and trustworthy. At this moment, we’re in dire need of implementing standards designed to make digital services as private and secure as they need to be.

Related: How matter addresses vulnerabilities of smart home devices

A breakthrough is about to happen with the roll out this fall of Matter, a new home automation connectivity standard backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Comcast and others.

Matter is intended to be the lingua franca for the Internet of Things. It’s only a first step and there’s a long way to go. That said, Matter is an important stake in the ground. To get a full grasp on why Matter matters, I recently visited with Steve Hanna, distinguished engineer at Infineon Technologies, a global semiconductor manufacturer based in Neubiberg, Germany.

For a full drill down on our evocative discussion, please watch the accompanying videocast. Here are the main takeaways:

Comment | Read | October 19th, 2022 | For consumers | For technologists | My Take | New Tech | Privacy | Steps forward | Top Stories | Videos

FIRESIDE CHAT: All-powerful developers begin steering to the promise land of automated security

By Byron V. Acohido

Software developers have become the masters of the digital universe.

Related: GraphQL APIs pose new risks

Companies in the throes of digital transformation are in hot pursuit of agile software and this has elevated developers to the top of the food chain in computing.

There is an argument to be made that agility-minded developers, in fact, are in a terrific position to champion the rearchitecting of Enterprise security that’s sure to play out over the next few years — much more so than methodical, status-quo-minded security engineers.

With Black Hat USA 2021 reconvening in Las Vegas this week, I had a deep discussion about this with Himanshu Dwivedi, founder and chief executive officer, and Doug Dooley, chief operating officer, of Data Theorem, a Palo Alto, CA-based supplier of a SaaS security platform to help companies secure their APIs and modern applications.

For a full drill down on this evocative conversation discussion please view the accompanying video. Here are the highlights, edited for clarity and length:

LW:  Bad actors today are seeking out APIs that they can manipulate, and then they follow the data flow to a weakly protected asset. Can you frame how we got here?

Dwivedi: So 20 years ago, as a hacker, I’d go see where a company registered its IP. I’d do an ARIN Whois look-up. I’d profile their network and build an attack tree. Fast forward 20 years and everything is in the cloud. Everything is in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure and I can’t tell where anything is hosted based solely on IP registration.

So as a hacker today, I’m no longer looking for a cross-site scripting issue of some website since I can only attack one person at a time with that. I’m looking at the client, which could be an IoT device, or a mobile app or a single page web app (SPA) or it could be an … more

Comment | Read | August 3rd, 2021 | Black Hat Podcasts | For consumers | For technologists | Imminent threats | Q & A | Top Stories | Videos

FIRESIDE CHAT: The drivers behind the stark rise — and security implications — of ‘memory attacks’

By Byron V. Acohido

A distinctive class of hacking is rising to the fore and is being leveraged by threat actors to carry out deep, highly resilient intrusions of well-defended company networks.

Related: Memory hacking becomes a go-to tactic

These attacks are referred to in the security community as “fileless attacks” or “memory attacks.” The latter conveys a more precise picture: memory hacking refers to a broad set of practices, which can include fileless attacks, that constitute this go-deep form of network break-ins.

I had the chance at RSA 2019 to discuss memory hacking with Willy Leichter, vice president of marketing, and Shauntinez Jakab, director of product marketing, at Virsec, a San Jose-based supplier of advanced application security and memory protection technologies.

They walked me through how threat actors are cleverly slipping snippets of malicious code past perimeter defenses and then executing their payloads  – undetected while applications are live, running in process memory.

For a long time, memory hacking was the exclusive province of nation-state backed operatives. But over the past couple of years, memory attacks have come into regular use by common cybercriminals. Garden-variety threat actors are now leveraging memory hacking tools and techniques to gain footholds, move laterally and achieve persistence deep inside well-defended networks.

For a comprehensive drill down, please view the accompanying YouTube video of my full interview with Leichter and Jakab at RSA 2019’s broadcast alley. Here are excerpts, edited for clarity and length:

LW: Can you frame this new class of hacking?

Comment | Read | May 6th, 2019 | For technologists | Imminent threats | Q & A | RSA Podcasts | Top Stories | Videos

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