Items tagged with IoT
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but the holiday season is still in full effect. There are lots of new Internet of Things (IoT) devices out there, and even more that will be given out as gifts. IoT devices cover a wide gamut of connected items that include just about anything that is internet-connected today, like thermostats, wearables, smart speakers, and even refrigerators. All of these IoT devices send and receive data and have the potential to open the door to hackers. The FBI is asking people who are bringing the devices into their homes if they know how the data the devices utilize is being collected and where the data is going. The FBI is urging everyone to protect themselves...
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When it comes to home Wi-Fi routers, the newest trend is the prevalence of mesh routers, which allows you to more evenly spread coverage thanks to the use of a base station and one or more satellites. In the recent weeks, we've seen new low-cost mesh routers like the Netgear Orbi Dual-Band and the Nest Wifi. The folks over at Brigham Young University, however, have developed a new software protocol that modifies Wi-Fi signals in order to greatly extend range. The protocol, which is called On-Off Noise Power Communication (ONPC), abandons that usual convention that speeds of at least 1Mbps are needed to maintain a Wi-Fi signal. With ONPC, speeds of just 1 bit per second are sufficient...
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Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become more prevalent over the last few years, but they are often susceptible to hackers. Researchers recently discovered 125 security vulnerabilities on 13 NAS and routers. It is believed that these vulnerabilities are far-reaching and likely affect many similar devices. Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) researchers started their investigation in 2013. Their first round of research focused on NAS and routers that were intended for home office use. Their second round titled “SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0” assess security vulnerabilities in a wide range of device. They chose 13 devices that “ranged from devices designed for general consumers...
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If you're running a version of Windows IoT Core, you'll want to pay attention to the latest vulnerability discovered by Dor Azouri, a researcher for SafeBreach. The risk of leaving the bug unpatched is great, but fortunately, most of the Windows ecosystem is safe. Even the IoT Enterprise version is safe from this bug; only those using the free IoT Core on their DIY devices (eg: Raspberry Pi) will need to take action. The issue lays with IoT Core's Sirep Test service, which allows users to perform tests on given hardware. The researcher discovered that this service could be used to reveal a remote command line interface which could be used to exploit the system. Once compromised, an attacker would...
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NVIDIA launched its first Jetson family products back in 2015 when its Jetson TX1 system aimed to be the brains behind autonomous devices, from drones to robotics and autonomous vehicles. The Silicon Valley GPU giant then added to the Jetson line in 2017 with the Jetson TX2 for commercial drones and smart robots. Today, NVIDIA has now announced the latest addition to the Jetson family called the Jetson AGX Xavier Module, and the company says this new processing engine is targeted at bringing up to 32 TOPS of performance to next-generation autonomous machines. Despite its big processing power, the AGX Xavier Module is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand (or robotic arm), and...
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A group of hackers claims to have a service that will allow anyone willing to spend $250 to send out a "marketing" campaign that can reach "every single printer in the world." The people are offering to sell advertisers a spot in "the most viral ad campaign in history" according to the advertisement for the service. Security experts the world over have had concerns about the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the security of web-connected printers specifically. HP has in the past offered $10,000 in bug bounty money to get white hat hackers to find bugs in its printers. We also talked in depth about some of the security hazards that the IoT posed last year. Hackers have taken advantage...
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It does not seem all that farfetched that one day even your toaster will connect to the web and download crusty designs to sear into your bread. We have entered the Internet of Things (IoT) era. The focus on IoT devices can lead to some fun and interesting things (and of course useful), but also comes with added risk. To that end, security researchers warn of newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting one of the most popular IoT platforms out there. That platform is FreeRTOS, which is widely used in a range of IoT and embedded devices. FreeRTOS is a real-time operating system kernel with a small memory footprint and low overhead. It's also pretty fast and supported on a whole bunch of architectures,...
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In recent years, we've seen a number of garden variety consumer electronics devices -- including routers and webcams among others -- that have been sucked into zombie botnets to wreak havoc around the globe. Many of those devices were accessible due to extremely weak passwords that were enacted by default by their manufacturers. California, however, is looking to change this and has passed a law that would require all internet-connected device sold in the state to have a unique "strong" password. This unique password would be obtained in one of two ways as outlined by the "Information Privacy: Connected Devices" bill. Manufacturers can choose to give each individual device...
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Google is rolling out a couple of new products aimed at helping customers build and deploy intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) devices at scale. One of those products is the Edge TPU (tensor processing unit), a tiny hardware chip designed to muscle through machine learning tasks in IoT gadgets, and the other is Cloud IoT Edge, a software stack that extends Google's Cloud AI to gateways and connected devices. Used together, Google's two new products enable customers to build and train machine learning models in the cloud, then run those models on the Cloud IoT Edge device through the power of the Edge TPU hardware accelerator. "By running on-device machine learning models, Cloud IoT Edge with...
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TP-Link has been making mesh routers in the Deco range for a while now that are designed to give you WiFi access all around a home or office. Last year, the company launched the Deco M5 mesh router and now the company has announced the new Deco M9 Plus. This mesh router is notable because in addition to offering WiFi coverage, it also has an integrated smart home hub for IoT devices. The M9 Plus supports AC2200 speeds and tri-band WiFi with dedicated 5GHz backhaul for faster speeds and dependable connectivity for over 100 devices across the entire home. The router uses TP-Link Mesh technology to eliminate dead spots in the home or office with a single Deco M9 Plus kit with a pair of the access...
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Intel is looking to become a big player in the 5G wireless revolution that it set to sweep the globe in the coming years. As a result, the company is giving an update on its wireless modem roadmap, which includes extensions of its existing 4G LTE products and upcoming 5G-based SKUs that will ship within the next two years. On the 4G LTE front, Intel's current top-shelf modem is the XMM 7480, which supports 4x carrier aggregation and download/upload speeds of 600Mbps and 150Mbps respectively (it’s prominently used in AT&T/T-Mobile versions of Apple’s iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X). The successor to the XMM 7480 is the previously announced XMM 7560, which Intel says is already...
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We first got a glimpse at the BlueBorne vulnerability back in September, when it was revealed that that Bluetooth-based attack vector was exploitable on phones, computers, and IoT devices -- basically, anything with a Bluetooth radio. BlueBorne was especially nasty since it is capable of man-in-the-middle attacks and remote code execution. It was initially revealed that both Windows- and iOS-based devices had been updated to defend against BlueBorne, while Android device manufacturers should have already delivered updates to address the exploit. However, we're now learning about another category of devices that are susceptible to BlueBorne's nefarious deeds: digital AI assistants. According to...
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A security firm is warning of a new botnet targeting IoT (Internet of Things) devices that is on the move. Dubbed IoT_reaper, the new botnet borrows some of the source code from Mirai, which took down the popular security blog KrebsOnSecurity with a massive DDoS attack, ultimately forcing Brian Krebs, the security expert in charge of the blog, to find a new hosting company and seek shelter behind Google Shield for DDoS protection. Unfortunately, it is believed that this new strain called Reaper could be even more virulent than Mirai. Whereas Mirai was able to spread by cracking weak passwords on IoT devices that oftentimes were never changed from their defaults, Reaper looks for multiple vulnerabilities...
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There are lots of obvious examples of how IoT (Internet of Things) connected and smart devices can enrich our lives. However, as we've noted numerous times over the past year, there are a number of caveats that can also come with them. The glaring issue of course has to do with security, or the lack of it really. And perhaps the absolute lack of ownership certain manufacturers take with it and their products. Research firm Radware once helps underscore the glaring need for better IoT security with some hard proof about what we're dealing with. Employing a "honeypot" approach - a system specifically designed to lure exploits - the firm found that IoT attacks are not just on...
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