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The hackers discovered  2 Vulnerabilities, the first vulnerability was exploited to install a malicious binary on the device, and the second vulnerability was later exploited to reset the device. On some devices, the attackers installed a trojan  for My Book Live and Live Duo. People without backup lost nearly 2TB worth of data in this IoT.

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Aviv Sinai

This month has been off to a bad start for My Book Live & My Cloud users and even worse for Western Digital.

It all started with Ars Technica publishing a write-up of how hackers exploited a 0-day to clear My Book Live devices of all user data. A series of brand-damaging media coverage pursued and then a week later, yet another vulnerability was discovered on their My Cloud NAS boxes which worked to really fan the flames of an already burning brand.

Western Digital had the storage of their My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices completely wiped. As users fumed about losing years worth of data, security researchers explained that this was due to two vulnerabilities; the first of which was a remote code execution (RCE) that enabled it to be compromised, the second, a critical security bug that allowed hackers to remotely perform a factory reset without a password.

The later exposed vulnerability involves an attack chain that allows an unauthenticated intruder to execute root code and install a permanent backdoor on the MyBook cloud network-attached storage (NAS) device. Effectively providing a backdoor entrance for hackers to put in any malware they like, that's impossible to remove even after a reboot.

In these situations, the best defense is always offense. An endpoint detection and response agent , specifically tailored for IoT devices, will keep these types of incidents at bay. We detail how product processes enabled these exploits to occur and what product managers can do to remedy them.

The My Book Live is Dead

Western Digital stopped supporting the My Book Live in 2015. The first remote command execution vulnerability surfaced in late 2018, but because it was found three years after Western Digital stopped supporting the device, the bug was never fixed. The My Book Live attack is significant not only because hackers were able to wipe petabytes of user data from each device, but also because it was a Western Digital developer that had actively removed code that required a valid user password before allowing a factory reset to be made.

Their decision to stop supporting the My Book Live device may be due to it no longer being profitable, but that doesn't mean that hackers took up the memo. On the contrary, popular devices that are no longer supported represent a gold target for hackers as they provide a potential opening that's freely exposed. Removing the code that required a valid user password to access the device, was an unjustifiable risk, most likely a critical oversight.

My Book Live. Photo by I Shingi

My Cloud in No Man's Land

The NAS device vulnerability is found on the old My Cloud 3 operating system which, again, is another device no-longer-supported, and is effectively sitting in no man's land when it comes to security patching. According to Radek Domanski and Pedro Ribeiro , the security researchers who discovered the exploit, the My Cloud OS 3 was replaced by the My Cloud OS 5, an almost total rewrite of its predecessor - but slimmer. On the one hand, the OS 5 no longer has the bug, but it also no longer has many of the popular functionalities and features. For that reason, the researchers feel many users are unlikely to upgrade, a sentiment that certainly seemed to be the case on Western Digital's support forum where many OS 3 users were complaining about their data vanishing.

Western Digital knew about the flaw affecting OS 3 several months before support ended for this platform. While their focus was clearly on releasing a new major version that included the security fix, they should have also backported the fix on the OS 3 in the considerable time that they had before putting it out to pasture.

All Quiet on the Western Front

In both cases, Western Digital failed to respond to security researchers who actually found 5 critical remote code execution flaws and published their findings back in November 2020. Instead, their response was a veritable shrug of the shoulders, not ever having clarified if any of the discovered flaws were being patched. At their most responsive, they released a recommendation for users to ditch OS 3 and upgrade to OS 5.

The critical remedies for product managers

As bad as things look, Western Digital can salvage their reputation in these critical next few days, as the public is watching to see how they respond to these exposed vulnerabilities.

Publicize commitment to security & accept responsibility
Western Digital will need to demonstrate and publicize its commitment to the security and privacy of its users around the world. The company has clearly developed its brand on the basis of its social conscience and ethics, and therefore it's especially important that in this circumstance they walk the talk and accept responsibility. If they choose to sweep the event under the rug or defer blame it will look bad and be perceived as weak and hypocritical. The tireless effort to establish customer loyalty and trust will be severely undermined.

Put proof behind the commitment & demonstrate the new security measures
They will need to detail the additional security measures that they are taking to prevent similar RCEs from occurring in the future. This will mean continuing to patch devices and OS that are no longer actively supported. This could be part of a larger protocol on how the security of old devices will be maintained as new flaws come to light that will undoubtedly still affect users. Customer reassurance must be demonstrated, not just promised, providing the details of how these vulnerabilities will be closed is critical.

Build resilience against future exploits & get real-time security on the device
Where a manufacturer is no longer supporting a device, a proactive security layer becomes critical towards minimizing the risk of its continued use. Even if a product version is put out to pasture, a proactive security solution on the device will still continue to operate and monitor for any exploits, malware, and unusual behavior. will keep security under wraps, even if the manufacturer has moved on.

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Western Digital: Where Things Went Wrong & 3 Steps for Product Managers to Remedy - Firedome

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Aviv Sinai This month has been off to a bad start for My Book Live & My Cloud users and even worse for Western Digital. It all started with Ars Technica publishing a write-up of how hackers exploited a 0-day to clear My Book Live devices of all user data.

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In 2017, attackers demonstrated the ability to manipulate the firmware of over 465,000 implanted pacemakers, making it possible to drain the pacemaker battery, steal sensitive data or even change lifesaving settings on the pacemaker itself.

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Reuters

Users of St. Jude Medical's implantable heart devices can go to bed tonight with a little less fear they'll get hacked.

St. Jude, now under control of Abbott Laboratories, said Monday that it is releasing cyber-security patches for the Merlin monitoring system used with its pacemakers and defibrillator devices.

St. Jude's announcement came as the Food and Drug Administration warned Monday about "vulnerabilities" in St. Jude devices that could allow hackers to break into pacemakers, resulting in battery depletion or "inappropriate pacing or shocks."

The FDA said it reviewed St. Jude's software patch to ensure that it takes care of the "greatest risks" posed by the devices and cuts further "risk of exploitation and subsequent patient harm."

"There have been no reports of patient harm related to these cybersecurity vulnerabilities," the FDA said.

The news comes five months after short-selling firm Muddy Waters called out the safety of the devices. The FDA's findings mirrored those of Muddy Waters.

"This long-overdue acknowledgment, just days after completion of St. Jude's sale to Abbott Laboratories, reaffirms our belief that the company puts profits over patients," Carson Block of Muddy Waters said.

"It also reaffirms our belief that had we not gone public, St. Jude would not have remediated the vulnerabilities."

When Muddy Water's announced its short position on St. Jude in August, the company denied Muddy Waters' claims. St. Jude even sued Muddy Waters in September, accusing it of orchestrating a "willful and malicious scheme to manipulate the securities markets for their own financial windfall."

Undeterred by the suit, Muddy Waters a month later launched a website called Profits Over Patients, which had videos that claimed to show the heart devices being hacked.

Shares of St. Jude's no longer trade since being acquired by Abbott in a $25 billion deal earlier this month, putting the potential gain of Muddy Waters' short position into question.

Despite its seeming moral win, Block said Monday's announcement still fails to fix "larger problems, including the existence of a universal code that could allow hackers to control the implants."

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St. Jude releasing patches to protect pacemakers from hackers

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Users of St. Jude Medical's implantable heart devices can go to bed tonight with a little less fear they'll get hacked. St. Jude, now under control of Abbott Laboratories, said Monday that it is releasing cyber-security patches for the Merlin monitoring system used with its pacemakers and defibrillator devices. St.

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While its attack vector is reportedly similar to Mirai (detected by Trend Micro as ELF_MIRAI family), which turns infected devices into bots, BrickerBot “bricks” the device it infects, rendering the device permanently inoperable. BrickerBot is a real-world instance of phlashing.(Permanent DoS). In an attack in 2017 it has killed over 2 million devices.

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In June 2010, a client contacted their malware detection firm to find out why their machines were constantly rebooting. This company, headquartered in Belarus, identified the root cause as a piece of malware that masqueraded behind what appeared to be a valid digital certificate from a trusted vendor. The worm had already wrought havoc within Iranian nuclear facilities, slowly (even insidiously) sabotaging centrifuges and ultimately the entire Natanz nuclear plant.

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What is Stuxnet?

Stuxnet is a powerful computer worm designed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence that to disable a key part of the Iranian nuclear program. Targeted at an air-gapped facility, it unexpectedly spread to outside computer systems, raising a number of questions about its design and purpose.

Stuxnet exploited multiple previously unknown Windows zero days. That description should probably make it clear that Stuxnet was a part of a high-level sabotage operation waged by nation-states against their adversaries.

Who created Stuxnet?

It's now widely accepted that Stuxnet was created by the intelligence agencies of the United States and Israel. Stuxnet was first identified by the infosec community in 2010, but development on it probably began in 2005. The U.S. and Israeli governments intended Stuxnet as a tool to derail, or at least delay, the Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons. The Bush and Obama administrations believed that if Iran were on the verge of developing atomic weapons, Israel would launch airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in a move that could have set off a regional war. Operation Olympic Games was seen as a nonviolent alternative. Although it wasn't clear that such a cyberattack on physical infrastructure was even possible, there was a dramatic meeting in the White House Situation Room late in the Bush presidency during which pieces of a destroyed test centrifuge were spread out on a conference table. It was at that point that the U.S. gave the go-head to unleash the malware.

The classified program to develop the worm was given the code name "Operation Olympic Games"; it was begun under President George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. While neither government has ever officially acknowledged developing Stuxnet, a 2011 video created to celebrate the retirement of Israeli Defense Forces head Gabi Ashkenazi listed Stuxnet as one of the successes under his watch.

While the individual engineers behind Stuxnet haven't been identified, we know that they were very skilled, and that there were a lot of them. Kaspersky Lab's Roel Schouwenberg estimated that it took a team of ten coders two to three years to create the worm in its final form.

Several other worms with infection capabilities similar to Stuxnet, including those dubbed Duqu and Flame, have been identified in the wild, although their purposes are quite different from Stuxnet's. Their similarity to Stuxnet leads experts to believe that they are products of the same development shop, which is apparently still active.

What did Stuxnet do?

Stuxnet was designed to destroy the centrifuges Iran was using to enrich uranium as part of its nuclear program. Most uranium that occurs in nature is the isotope U-238; however, the fissile material used in a nuclear power plant or weapon needs to be made from the slightly lighter U-235. A centrifuge is used to spin uranium fast enough to separate the different isotopes by weight via to centrifugal force. These centrifuges are extremely delicate, and it's not uncommon for them to become damaged in the course of normal operation.

When Stuxnet infects a computer, it checks to see if that computer is connected to specific models of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Siemens. PLCs are how computers interact with and control industrial machinery like uranium centrifuges. If no PLCs are detected, the worm does nothing; if they are, Stuxnet then alters the PLCs' programming, resulting in the centrifuges being spun irregularly, damaging or destroying them in the process. While this is happening, the PLCs tell the controller computer (incorrectly) that everything is working fine, making it difficult to detect or diagnose what's going wrong until it's too late.

How did Stuxnet work?

Stuxnet attacks all layers of its target infrastructure: Windows, the Siemens software running on windows that controls the PLCs, and the embedded software on the PLCs themselves. It is designed to be delivered via a removable drive like a USB stick-the Natanz facility where the uranium enrichment was taking place was known to be air-gapped, with its systems not connected to the internet-but also to spread quickly and indiscriminately from machine to machine on an internal network.

Stuxnet includes rootkit abilities at both user and kernel mode. To install the kernel-mode rootkit, it uses digitally signed device drivers that use private key certificates stolen from two well-known Taiwanese device manufacturers.

Once in control of the PLCs, Stuxnet varied the rotation speeds of the centrifuges while they were in operation in a way that damaged them and left them inoperable in short order.

What vulnerability did Stuxnet exploit?

In order to infect the Windows PCs in the Natanz facility, Stuxnet exploited no fewer than four zero-day bugs-a Windows Shortcut flaw, a bug in the print spooler, and two escalation of privilege vulnerabilities-along with a zero-day flaw in the Siemens PLCs and an old hole already used in the Conficker attack. The sheer number of vulnerabilities exploited is unusual, as typically zero-days are quickly patched in the wake of an attack and so a hacker won't want to reveal so many in a single attack.

What language was Stuxnet written in?

While security researchers don't have access to the Stuxnet codebase, they've been able to learn a lot by studying it, and have determined that it was written in multiple languages, including C, C++, and probably several other object-oriented languages. This too is unusual for malware and is a sign of the level of sophistication involved in its creation.

Was Stuxnet successful?

The Stuxnet virus succeeded in its goal of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program; one analyst estimated that it set the program back by at least two years. The first outsiders to notice the effects of the worm were inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who were permitted access to the Natanz facility. Part of the IAEA's job was to inspect damaged centrifuges that were being removed from the facility to make sure they weren't being used to smuggle uranium out to some other plant that wasn't on the international community's radar. As noted above, it's typical for centrifuges to be damaged as part of the uranium enrichment process; at a facility on the scale of Natanz, you could expect about 800 centrifuges a year to be taken out of commission. But in 2010, the IAEA started noticing an unusually high number of damaged centrifuges, with one inspector estimating that almost 2,000 were rendered inoperable. At the time, of course, nobody had any idea that computer malware was causing this.

How was Stuxnet discovered?

Stuxnet was discovered because, unexpectedly, it spread beyond the Natanz facility. As noted, Natanz was air-gapped, and it's not clear how Stuxnet got out. Many in the U.S. believed the spread was the result of code modifications made by the Israelis; then-Vice President Biden was said to be particularly upset about this. It's also possible that it escaped thanks to poor security practices on the part of the Iranians at Natanz-it could've been something as simple as someone taking a work laptop home and connecting it to the internet. Thanks to the malware's sophisticated and extremely aggressive nature, it then began to spread to other computers.

Stuxnet soon became known to the security community thanks to a call to tech support. An office in Iran (not part of the nuclear program) was experiencing mysterious reboots and blue screens of death, which were even affecting computers with fresh OS installs. The on-site security expert, unable to figure out the cause, contacted a friend of his, a Belarusian named Sergey Ulasen who was working for the antivirus vendor VirusBlokAda. Ulasen was at a wedding reception, but spent the evening on the phone with his Iranian friend trying to figure out the cause of the problem. Ulasen and his team managed to isolate the malware and realized how many zero-days it was exploiting and what they were up against. They began the process of sharing their discoveries with the wider security community.

Liam O'Murchu, who's the director of the Security Technology and Response group at Symantec and was on the team there that first unraveled Stuxnet, says that Stuxnet was "by far the most complex piece of code that we've looked at-in a completely different league from anything we'd ever seen before." And while you can find lots of websites that claim to have the Stuxnet code available to download, O'Murchu says you shouldn't believe them: he emphasized to CSO that the original source code for the worm, as written by coders working for U.S. and Israeli intelligence, hasn't been released or leaked and can't be extracted from the binaries that are loose in the wild. (The code for one driver, a very small part of the overall package, has been reconstructed via reverse engineering, but that's not the same as having the original code.)

However, he explained that a lot about code could be understood from examining the binary in action and reverse-engineering it. For instance, he says, "it was pretty obvious from the first time we analyzed this app that it was looking for some Siemens equipment." Eventually, after three to six months of reverse engineering, " we were able to determine, I would say, 99 percent of everything that happens in the code," O'Murchu said.

And it was a thorough analysis of the code that eventually revealed the purpose of the malware. "We could see in the code that it was looking for eight or ten arrays of 168 frequency converters each," says O'Murchu. "You can read the International Atomic Energy Association's documentation online about how to inspect a uranium enrichment facility, and in that documentation they specify exactly what you would see in the uranium facility-how many frequency converters there will be, how many centrifuges there would be. They would be arranged in eight arrays and that there would be 168 centrifuges in each array. That's exactly what we were seeing in the code."

"It was very exciting that we'd made this breakthrough," he added. "But then we realized what we had got ourselves into-probably an international espionage operation-and that was quite scary." Symantec released this information in September of 2010; analysts who had gotten wind of the IAEA's observation of damaged Iranian centrifuges began to understand what was happening.

Is Stuxnet still out there?

Stuxnet hasn't vanished, but it is not a major cybersecurity threat today. In fact, while Stuxnet grabbed a lot of headlines due to its dramatic capabilities and cloak-and-dagger origins, it was never much of a threat to anybody other than the Natanz facility that was its original target. If your computer is infected with Stuxnet and you aren't connected to a centrifuge used for uranium enrichment, the worst case scenario is that you might see reboots and blue screens of death, like the Iranian office that brought the malware to the world's attention, but other than that little or no harm will come to you.

How to prevent Stuxnet

That said, you probably don't want your systems infected by powerful malware developed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. Fortunately, the zero-day vulnerabilities Stuxnet originally exploited have long been patched. As long as you're practicing the basics of good cyber hygiene, keeping your OS and security software up to date, you don't have much to worry about. Remember, Stuxnet affects PLCs, so you'll want to keep any operational technology as secure as possible as well.

Why is Stuxnet significant to cybersecurity?

If there's any threat coming from Stuxnet, it's one that emanates from its descendants. As we noted above, there are other malware families that seem to have functionality derived from Stuxnet; these may be from the same intelligence agency shop, or they might represent freelance hackers who have managed to reverse-engineer some of Stuxnet's power. Security researchers are still building off of Stuxnet to discover new attack techniques.

But beyond specific technologies, Stuxnet is significant because it represented the first widely recognized intrusion of computer code into the world of international conflict, an idea that previously had been in the realm of cyberpunk sci-fi. In the decade since, particularly in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, cyberattacks have become accepted as part of the arsenal of war.

Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.

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Stuxnet explained: The first known cyberweapon

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Stuxnet is a powerful computer worm designed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence that to disable a key part of the Iranian nuclear program. Targeted at an air-gapped facility, it unexpectedly spread to outside computer systems, raising a number of questions about its design and purpose. Stuxnet exploited multiple previously unknown Windows zero days.

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In this attack Mirai temporarily crippled several high-profile services such as OVH, Dyn, and Krebs on Security via massive distributed Denial of service attacks (DDoS). OVH reported that these attacks exceeded 1 Tbps—the largest on public record.

What’s remarkable about these record-breaking attacks is they were carried out via small, innocuous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices like home routers, air-quality monitors, and personal surveillance cameras. At its peak, Mirai infected over 600,000 vulnerable IoT devices.

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The cyber-attack that brought down much of America's internet last week was caused by a new weapon called the Mirai botnet and was likely the largest of its kind in history, experts said.

The victim was the servers of Dyn, a company that controls much of the internet's domain name system (DNS) infrastructure. It was hit on 21 October and remained under sustained assault for most of the day, bringing down sites including Twitter, the Guardian, Netflix, Reddit, CNN and many others in Europe and the US.

The cause of the outage was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which a network of computers infected with special malware, known as a "botnet", are coordinated into bombarding a server with traffic until it collapses under the strain.

What makes it interesting is that the attack was orchestrated using a weapon called the Mirai botnet. According to a blogpost by Dyn published on Wednesday, Mirai was the "primary source of malicious attack traffic".

Unlike other botnets, which are typically made up of computers, the Mirai botnet is largely made up of so-called " internet of things " (IoT) devices such as digital cameras and DVR players.

Because it has so many internet-connected devices to choose from, attacks from Mirai are much larger than what most DDoS attacks could previously achieve. Dyn estimated that the attack had involved "100,000 malicious endpoints", and the company, which is still investigating the attack, said there had been reports of an extraordinary attack strength of 1.2Tbps.

To put that into perspective, if those reports are true, that would make the 21 October attack roughly twice as powerful as any similar attack on record.

David Fidler, adjunct senior fellow for cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he couldn't recall a DDoS attack even half as big as the one that hit Dyn.

Mirai was also used in an attack on the information security blog Krebs on Security, run by the former Washington Post journalist Brian Krebs, in September. That one topped out at 665 Gbps.

"We have a serious problem with the cyber insecurity of IoT devices and no real strategy to combat it," Fidler said. "The IoT insecurity problem was exploited on this significant scale by a non-state group, according to initial reports from government agencies and other experts about who or what was responsible.

"Imagine what a well-resourced state actor could do with insecure IOT devices," he added.

According to Joe Weiss, the managing partner at the cybersecurity firm Applied Control Solutions and the author of Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats, it is hard to know what Mirai could become. "A lot of these cyber-attacks start out as one particular type of attack and then they morph into something new or different," he said. "A lot of this is modular software.

"I can't speak for anyone else," Weiss continued. "[But] I don't know that we really understand what the endgame is."

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DDoS attack that disrupted internet was largest of its kind in history, experts say

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The cyber-attack that brought down much of America's internet last week was caused by a new weapon called the Mirai botnet and was likely the largest of its kind in history, experts said. The victim was the servers of Dyn, a company that controls much of the internet's domain name system (DNS) infrastructure.

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Articles on some of the recent cybersecurity attacks & IoT

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Inadequate default settings: IoT devices that contain default settings may include default passwords and other settings that cannot be changed.

Non-existent upgrade paths: Sometimes, it is impossible to update the firmware or other information itself, making the device permanently toxic to healthy IoT networks.

The use of inappropriate technology: Many times, organizations will place powerful software onto an IoT device, even though such computing power is not necessary. For example, IoT manufacturers have placed complete Linux operating system on an IoT device, when only a portion was necessary. As a result, once the IoT device was compromised, it became a powerful weapon in the hands of an attacker.

Limited computational abilities and hardware limitations. These devices have specific functions that warrant only limited computational abilities, leaving little room for robust security mechanisms and data protection.

Heterogeneous transmission technology. Devices often use a variety of transmission technology. This can make it difficult to establish standard protection methods and protocols.

Components of the device are vulnerable. Vulnerable basic components affect millions of deployed smart devices.

Users lacking security awareness. Lack of user security awareness could expose smart devices to vulnerabilities and attack openings.

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Machine phishing will become a significant concern in the coming years. Hackers will infiltrate IoT devices and networks to send fake signals that will cause the owners to take actions that could damage the operational network. Attackers, for example, could have a manufacturing plant report it’s working on half capacity (while it’s working on 100%), and the plant operator will try to increase further the load, which can be devastating for the plant.

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A.I. and automation are just code; if somebody gets access to this code, they can control the automation and carry out whatever they want. So, we have to ensure that our tools stay safe against such attacks and threats.

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Ransomware has been used on PC and corporate networks for a long time. Criminals encrypt your entire system and threaten to remove all your data unless you pay the “Ransom,” thus the name. Researchers have already found a way to install ransomware on smart thermostats, which is alarming as criminals can raise or lower the temperature until the ransom has been paid. Attackers gaining control of home security systems or smart appliances are even more terrifying.

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Weak credentials leave almost all the IoT-connected devices prone to brute-forcing and password hacking. Companies using unsafe credentials on their IoT devices put their customers and their business at risk of being susceptible to direct attacks and being infected through a brute-force attempt.

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The evolution of technology has brought us a plethora of smart devices, which include, but are not limited to, smart appliances, smart home systems, etc. These devices use similar computing power as other IoT-connected devices and can be used for various activities. A compromised device can be turned into an email server. According to a report by the Internet security firm Proofpoint, a smart refrigerator was used to send thousands of spam emails without its owners having any clue. Most of these smart devices are capable of being turned into email servers to send mass email spam.

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IoT security is one of the major cybersecurity challenges today. Several challenges exist. IoT devices can also provide a rich breeding ground for attackers who want to conduct  DDoS attacks, such as through botnets. A botnet is a large collection of devices that has fallen under the control of a centralized attacker, or group of attackers. A botnet can include tens of thousands, or even millions of devices. Attackers can use these botnets to wage DDoS attacks or introduce malware to new victims. Many of the security breaches that find their way into the news are the results of botnets.

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The increased proliferation of IoT devices paved the way for the rise of IoT botnets that amplifies DDoS attacks today. This is a dangerous warning that the possibility of a sophisticated DDoS attack and a prolonged service outage will prevent businesses from growing.

While data breaches and ransomware are still considered among the more significant concern for businesses, the threats sometimes come from a direction we weren't expecting. Cybercriminals use botnets for various malicious purposes, most significantly for DDoS attacks against targets. The most important change is now the bot armies are increasingly made of IoT devices.

As the total installed base of IoT devices worldwide is expected to reach 30.9 billion by 2025, the IoT botnet threat and its overall power continue to expand.

Attackers seized the opportunity to create large botnets, to large complex DDoS attacks to disable or knock offline a target website. Although the IoT botnets can steal confidential data, as seen in the instance of the Torri botnet, most of the botnets have been used for DDoS attacks.

This is a dangerous warning for an online business to ensure they have effective anti-DDoS protection and bot takeover prevention.

High-Level Anatomy of IoT DDoS Attack

So, what is a botnet? - A botnet is a group of infected computers under the control of attackers used to perform various scams and cyber-attacks. Here, the attackers use malware to take control of vulnerable IoT devices to block legitimate users from accessing internet services by executing DDoS attacks.

A simple principle governs a DDoS attack: it takes down websites offline by consuming more resources or occupying all available bandwidth. Attackers with more hijacked IoT devices can consume more resources and launch a more damaging attack. The three main goals of attackers include:

To cause consumption of limited resources

To cause destructive changes to network devices

To change or destroy configuration information

Why Are IoT Devices Easy Prey for Botnet Malware?

The increased proliferation of IoT devices has become an attractive target for attackers. Further, most IoT devices include serious security issues like weak passwords, open access to management systems, default administrative credentials, or weak security configurations. As millions of IoT devices and their numbers continue to increase, they are not constantly updated to patch against security vulnerabilities.

Botnet attacks seize the opportunity of IoT vulnerabilities to take control of the devices and lead to disruptions in online services. They're most placed on networks that are not monitored for the attack, making it easy for attackers to access them. Further, in most cases, the network where they reside offers a high-speed connection that enables a large amount of DDoS attack traffic.

Major IoT Botnet DDoS Attack Trends

IoT botnet DDoS attacks are not new; Mirai was the most prevalent and has continued to target IoT devices since 2016. Mirai made its debut on September 20, 2016, with a DDoS attack against cybersecurity expert Krebs's blog. The next notable IoT botnet DDoS attack was in October 2016 against Dyn, a major DNS (Domain Name Service). The Mirai botnet assaulted the victim with one terabit traffic per second, which made a new record in a DDoS attack.

According to the ENISA threat landscape report, in 2019, the Mirai variants increased by 57%. The Verizon data breach investigations report recorded 103 699 botnet incidents primarily targeting professional, financial, and information services industry verticals.

A new variant of Mirai called Mozi accounted for the most observed flooded traffic in late 2019 through 2020. The Mirai and its variant continue to pose a threat in 2021; they broadened their attack with its significant new capabilities.

Attackers use multiple botnets based on Mirai and Mozi botnets like Echobot, BotenaGo, Moonet, and Loli to target devices. According to Sam's report on the IoT security landscape, more than 1 billion IoT security attacks took place in 2021, nearly 62 million of which were IoT-related DDoS attacks.

How Can You Protect Against IoT Botnet DDoS Attacks Today?

As the botnet landscape expands and highly sophisticated threats become inevitable, enterprises must move beyond legacy security solutions.

The first step to addressing these ongoing security challenges is moving to comprehensive risk-based security solutions. In addition, advanced, automated endpoint detection and protection solutions must offer complete visibility into IoT devices and their security state.

As always, prevention steps should be implemented to stay protected from such attacks:

Monitor incoming and outgoing traffic on your network for malicious activities with a web application firewall. Next-gen WAF like Indusface AppTrana can block bad bots from specific IPs while ensuring a smooth transfer of legitimate bot traffics.

Monitor login attempts and create a lookout for spikes

Keep IoT devices on protected networks

Perform continuous security testing on IoT devices

The Closure

DDoS attacks are the standard intent of an IoT botnet. DDoS may be an unavoidable part of the new reality, but you don't need to take it as the new norm. Architect robust security solutions to properly secure your businesses.

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IoT Botnets Fuels DDoS Attacks - Are You Prepared?

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The increased proliferation of IoT devices paved the way for the rise of IoT botnets that amplifies DDoS attacks today. This is a dangerous warning that the possibility of a sophisticated DDoS attack and a prolonged service outage will prevent businesses from growing.

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Where the attacker can make arbitrary changes to the settings of a device, which can cause loss of life, loss of service, damage to the device itself or damage to other devices.

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Hackers don't always steal data. Sometimes the goal is to manipulate the data to intentionally trigger external events that can be capitalized on.

Conventional wisdom says that once an attacker is in the system, moving laterally from network to network, the damage is already done. The adversary has found a way in and more than likely identified the data they're after. They simply need to exfiltrate it, the last step of the kill chain, to land the final blow.

In some scenarios, however, it's what the attacker doesn't do that could have a more devastating outcome on the enterprise.

Data manipulation attacks where an adversary does not take the data, but instead make subtle, stealthy tweaks to data for some type of gain, can be just as crippling for organizations compared to theft.

The ability of attackers to manipulate and shift data around is a real threat - one that could cause widespread financial and even physical harm as a result - if done successfully.
Data Manipulation Attack Examples
Consider the stock market. Hypothetically speaking, if an attacker were to successfully breach the IT systems and databases responsible for updating a stock ticker symbol and manipulate data to show a billion-dollar tech giant like Apple, Microsoft, Google or Amazon taking a nose dive, it would cause immediate chaos and panic would ensue. It could result in people selling off their stocks in a frenzy - the culmination of a deliberate and effective attack.

Data manipulation attacks don't always have to result in a tangible financial gain. If an attacker managed to carry out a similar attack against health record information for patients in hospitals and altered critical data like drug dosages and prescriptions that need to be administered, it could result in sickness or even death.

These types of attacks are commonly carried out by malicious insiders, individuals who have privileged access to critical data in the first place. If an insider got their hands on blueprints for a manufacturing facility that was being built, they could make minor modifications to drawings that could set the organization up for systemic failure. Understated and difficult to detect, an attack like this could ultimately put a company out of business and give a competitor, perhaps in an adversarial nation state, the ability to take over market share. I've seen this play out firsthand. When you have a "trusted" insider as the culprit, it makes it all that more difficult to detect and track down.
Who is Behind Data Manipulation Attacks?
Attackers like data manipulation attacks because they're hard to detect and they undermine trust and confidence. If there's no way to verify that data, like blueprints, documents, or source code are legitimate, it can erode trust from the inside out. Attacks that compromise integrity can jeopardize an entire supply chain. It only takes one flaw, far down a chain, to disrupt or delay the production of goods in an organization's cashflow.

Carmaker Tesla sued a former employee last summer after CEO Elon Musk alleged the insider stole confidential and trade secret information after he failed to get a promotion. While the employee purportedly exported gigabytes of confidential data he also made changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System, the set of basic commands for Tesla's manufacturing lines, under false usernames, apparently in an act of sabotage. Manipulating sensitive data, like source code, isn't flashy but is something that can cause the market to slowly unravel over time.

For organizations, it's inevitable that attackers will take data. It's more of a challenge to determine when an attacker makes a small change to data, then leaves the scene of the crime. For threat hunters, from a digital forensic perspective, there's typically always a trace left behind. Anomalies in system logs, edits to files at suspicious times, and alarms on threat signatures to detect suspicious techniques and malicious behavior, can be telltale signs of data manipulation.
Mitigating Against Data Manipulation Attacks
To combat these types of attacks, organizations need to ensure they have endpoint visibility on their IT systems. If an outsider successfully penetrates a network, they'll need to move laterally through the environment to find the data they're after. It's critical for incident responders or threat hunters to be able to follow in their proverbial forensic footsteps, to proactively hunt and detect this type of activity before something irreversible is done.

The MITRE ATT&CK Framework has been buzzed about across the industry lately for good reason. The knowledge base - a living, breathing breakdown of adversary TTPs and behaviors - outlines in great detail each phase of a cyber attack and the best methods for detecting and mitigating each technique. The framework can greatly help threat hunters looking to speed up their hunting cycle.

While attackers may not necessarily leave the endpoint with data in these types of attacks, organizations would benefit from using endpoint detection and response tools to gain better visibility into behaviors and data movement. Organizations can also use file integrity monitoring solutions to identify and track real-time changes to files, folders, and other settings.

Logging activity can also help but it's not a silver bullet. IT teams need to develop internal controls to audit this information and ensure they constantly have eyes on the glass, triaging logs generated by their environment.

Data manipulation attacks can have disastrous consequences and cause a significant disruption to a business, country, or even the world in some circumstances. Being prepared is the first step to potentially limiting or preventing the impact of these attacks.

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What are Data Manipulation Attacks, and How to Mitigate Against Them

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Hackers don't always steal data. Sometimes the goal is to manipulate the data to intentionally trigger external events that can be capitalized on. Conventional wisdom says that once an attacker is in the system, moving laterally from network to network, the damage is already done.

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Gaining improper access to personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, user accounts, social security, national health ID numbers, telephone numbers and residence addresses. Increasingly, organizations and individuals alike are concerned about the use – and misuse – of personal information.

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Manipulating an IoT device or devices to make an essential service (e.g., a power generating dam, the water system, a database) completely unavailable.

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Cybercriminals love IoT and OT devices, too. Maybe even more than we do. The major issue with IoT and ICS devices is that they make it possible for an individual or company to conduct new and different cyberattacks. Hackers will find malicious ways to interfere with the operations of a company, city or even country. Cybersecurity professionals often refer to this fact by saying that IoT increases the attack surface that hackers can exploit.

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| Internet of Things, refers to the collective network of connected devices and the technology that facilitates communication between devices and the cloud, as well as between the devices themselves. Thanks to the advent of inexpensive computer chips and high bandwidth telecommunication, we now have billions of devices  connected to the internet. This means everyday devices like toothbrushes, vacuums, cars, and machines can use sensors to collect data and respond intelligently to users.

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What Are IoT Devices : Definition, Types, and 5 Most Popular Ones for 2022

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Wondering what are IoT devices and how do they work? Learn about IoT devices and how they help connect the physical world to the digital world and more now.

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It is an interconnected system of physical and digital objects, personally used by a consumer. These interrelated devices are provided with unique identifiers to recognize and access various entities for many purposes. Consumer IoT covers all the user’s network around their personal and home devices.

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Published By - Kelsey Taylor

Consumer Internet of Things or CIoT is an interconnected system of physical and digital objects, personally used by a consumer.

These interrelated devices are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) to recognize and access various entities for many purposes.

Consumer IoT covers all the user's network around their personal and home devices.

In IoT, the devices are integrated with multiple wireless technologies and microcontrollers. That makes it easier to share consumer data and information without any individual's direct interaction with each other or the computer.

Consumer IoT devices and their applications are quickly integrating themselves into our daily routine.

Consumers benefit from IoT systems in a lot of ways. Consumer IoT applications are increasing in efficiency and ease of use with fast-growing computing capabilities.

Consumer IoT devices use edge computing technologies. It improves scalability and saves power in consumer IoT devices' by crunching data instantaneously. It also enables and optimizes data visualization and M2M communications.

The Internet of Things devices covers the mechanical and digital systems that are interconnected and can collect and share data amongst each other with the help of sensors.

IoT Device employs built-in sensors, Bluetooth, RFID, NFC, GPS, and internet connectivity in your smartphones and other devices to capture accurate time and location.

However, this may also pose privacy and security threats in some cases.

You have IoT systems that help you manage all of your consumer IoT apps and devices easily.

For example, you have smartphones that can be used to access all the products around your smart home.

In short, everything is interlinked in IoT.

Consumer IoT devices and applications are mainly subdivided into two types:

Personal IoT
Personal IoT devices and applications include wearable, hearable, smartphones and personal laptop gadgets such as-

Smart Clothing
Examples - Ralph Lauren smart t-shirt, Arrow Smart Shirt with NFC.

Smart Watch
Examples - Apple Watch, Fitbit.

Battery power-sharing between two smartphones
Examples - Donor Cable bracelets by NAR Mobile.

Hearable
Examples - AirPods, Google Pixel Buds.

Smart glass
Examples - Dropcam from Google, Vuzix Smart Glasses.

Smart Home IoT
Smart Home IoT devices and applications include home automation products like smart kitchen gadgets and security systems with face recognition and voice control. Some examples are as follows-

Voice Assistance
Examples - Amazon Echo and Google Home Smart Voice-Activated Speaker

Security
Examples - Nortek Security & Control products for access control & emergency, Bitdefender BOX.

Lighting fixtures
Examples - Philips Hue Smart Bulbs, LIFX, L8 SmartLight, etc.

Smart Energy Savings
Examples - Ambi Climate, Neurio, iDevices Switch, Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller, etc.

Family Entertainment
Examples - Keepon social robot, Kuri home robot, Singlecue gesture control.

Smart Kitchen Gadgets
Examples - iGrill Smart grill thermometer, Samsung Family Hub, Birdi monitors.

The above mentioned IoT products cover only some of the top numerous consumer IoT trends right now.

The ongoing competition is fierce, owing to the potential of IoT in the consumer market.

Multiple notable companies are participating and exploiting the trends in combination with technologies like big data, machine learning, 5G, deep learning cloud, and edge computing.

Consumer IoT trends are setting an example with every step because of their extensive usage and capabilities. This Consumer IoT market is spreading rapidly due to its following applications:

Asset tracking

Games and Entertainment

Health monitoring

Home security

Parental tracking

Quick Panic Buttons/SOS

According to the Global Consumer IoT Market report, Consumer IoT Market is estimated to reach USD 153.80 Billion by 2026. By 2023, home automation devices with smart energy management and security applications will hold the largest share of the consumer IoT market.

The growing use of the internet, smart devices adoption, and increasing security are the major driving factors for consumer IoT market growth.

Also Read: 8 Applications of Industrial Internet of Things

The Internet of Things as a whole has a comprehensive set of applications in multiple industries.

With the latest and emerging technologies, the Internet of Things is getting stronger and broader in terms of usage. Internet of Things devices and applications are mainly are divided into:

1. Commercial IoT

2. Consumer IoT

3. Industrial IoT (IIoT)

4. Infrastructure IoT

5. Military Things (IoMT)

Consumer IoT vs. Industrial IoT

Consumer IoT (CIoT) provides convenience and a better lifestyle for individuals mostly. On the other hand, the Industrial IoT (IIoT) has been the focus of attention for the organizations.

Just like CIoT, IIoT has a variety of applications to help industries and factories upgrade and automate their machinery and other systems.

Some IIoT applications are manufacturing, energy management, and predictive maintenance. IIoT deals with much high powered systems and security issues.

Thus, to deal with it, the Industrial IoT systems need to have a higher tolerance and resilience for greater transparency, availability, scalability, and maintenance.

The internet of things is one of the digital pillars of every industry. IoT system usage is also the primary focus of the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) or Industry 4.0.

The approval and consumption of IoT have only spiked up since the IoT term was first conceived in 1999.

Globally, the IoT is eminent amongst users due to its ease of convergence with multiple technologies and its real-time monitoring and feedback.

The IoT is an extensive system with a growing number of devices. And its applications and use cases will only see an outgrowth in terms of usage and popularity.
Future of AIoT Technologies A combination of IoT and Condition Monitoring

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What You Need to Know About Consumer IoT (CIoT)

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Published By - Kelsey Taylor Consumer Internet of Things or CIoT is an interconnected system of physical and digital objects, personally used by a consumer. These interrelated devices are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) to recognize and access various entities for many purposes. Consumer IoT covers all the user's network around their personal and home devices.

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Commercial IoT refers to devices and systems for business and enterprise use. These can vary broadly by sector. IoT is increasingly leveraged in healthcare, event venues, office buildings, and more. Consumer IoT refers to B2C systems or products, such as wearables, personal medical alert devices, or mobile phones.

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Some of the current applications of the Internet of Things feel more trivial than others. Humans have been outrunning each other for a hundred thousand years without the aid of internet-connected sneakers, for instance. And using telephones to close the blinds in our homes often feels like more, not less, work.

But commercial IoT is a different beast. It's distinct from consumer IoT and arrives with different challenges and a separate set of benefits and opportunities. Here's a look at five of them.

1. Make Your Buildings More Efficient

Optimizing and automating building functionality-including HVAC and lighting-is one of the first and most appealing steps a company can make to take advantage of commercial IoT.

Internet-connected company infrastructure can take a page out of the consumer IoT playbook by creating separate profiles for each part of a building, based on the habits and preferences of the people who usually occupy it.

A company headquarters with multiple floors and teams won't have the same environmental requirements for each department-and after learning about typical usage, IoT devices like smart thermostats and smart humidity controls don't even need to be programmed by the end customer. They'll turn on when needed to the ideal temperature and reduce the temperature later when that part of the building is unoccupied again.

The same concept applies to automating facility and campus lighting systems as well. Unoccupied rooms won't burn through your utility budget. Instead, IoT solutions can dim or turn off the lighting automatically.

2. Bring Intelligence to the Supply Chain and Asset Management

Supply chain management goes far beyond estimating the time of arrival for a shipment of finished goods or raw materials. Thanks to advancements in sensors and scanning technologies, companies can perform ongoing cycle counts as products roll off the assembly floor using tracker tags ( e.g. RFID) in the field, including vehicles and other equipment ( e.g. with GPS).

Passive RFID improves on existing inventory and asset management technologies, such as barcodes, because they require less manual intervention. No matter what kinds of products or assets pass through your doors or loading docks-be they delivery vehicles, computers, furniture, or heavy equipment-keeping track of them in real-time, from destination to origin, is easier now than it ever was.

3. Improve Customer Insights and Boost Conversion

Sensors and location beacons in retail businesses and other commercial locations can yield valuable insights for the company and make life easier for the customer at the same time. On the consumer side of things, location-based technologies offer opportunities like these:

Geofencing delivers personalized recommendations and discounts when customers make an appearance in a brick-and-mortar store.

Location beacons can provide walking directions to help navigate to a desired product or area of the building.

The insights delivered by location and geofencing technologies unlock huge potential for businesses as well. By gathering data about how customers move around a retail space and which areas see the most traffic, companies can make better decisions about layout, inventory and product promotions. Those insights can also offer information about which types of customers frequent a location at various times of day and throughout the year.

Another concept, sometimes called "geoconquesting," uses geofencing to deliver offers to customers who pass close to a competitor location. When Dunkin Donuts rolled out a geoconquesting campaign based on competitor locations, they found that 36 percent of the customers who received the offer took them up on it.

4. Boost Safety Compliance and Facilitate Real-Time Decisions

Commercial IoT can be an ally when it comes to compliance and customer safety.

For companies that trade in perishable goods-whether a retail entity or a supply chain company tasked with safe delivery-the FDA provides regulations for temperature thresholds and the maximum time that products may exceed them. Refrigerated food products aren't fit for sale after two hours in temperatures exceeding 40°F. As a result, companies need something more than a temperature gauge. They need wireless connectivity providing awareness of things like refrigerated truck delays, power losses (even brief ones) and other factors that might put their compliance-and their customers-at risk.

Commercial IoT delivers such tools in the form of remote temperature probes and cloud connectivity for immediate (and auditable) data trails. The ability to observe data in real-time and make more timely decisions can help risk-averse companies save face as well as money. Food recalls jumped by an incredible 92 percent between 2012 and 2017 in the U.S. alone. Reacting in a timely fashion to quality control issues could help avoid a recall-or greatly cut down on reaction time if one proves necessary.

5. Improve Workplace Safety and Access Control

There are many ways IoT can facilitate workplace safety.

Assets equipped with sensors can alert maintenance staff proactively about impending parts failures to avoid employee injury. Connected technology can also automatically grant or restrict access to parts of a facility based on which employees are authorized and which are not. In 2017, over 4,000 deaths resulted from preventable circumstances -and preventive maintenance and access control are two keys for bringing that number down.

Access control can be a big cybersecurity problem. Many companies take the end-to-end security of their data pipelines for granted. And that's a mistake since the average data breach can cost a small business an average of $120,000 for each incident.

With IoT powering automated security gates and doors and employees using wearables or badges, your building's security system can recognize the approach of employees and unlock doors to facilities of high-risk areas and then lock them again afterward, or even grant and restrict privileges for operating certain machinery.

As we can see here, the implications for the Internet of Things in the commercial world are even more compelling than those at the consumer level. They can add real value to an organization and help tackle longstanding problems, including efficiency, compliance, safety, customer engagement and much more.

Author

Kayla Matthews is an IoT enthusiast and senior writer at MakeUseOf. You can also find her writing on VentureBeat, The Next Web and ProductivityBytes.com.

Kayla Matthews is an IoT enthusiast and senior writer at MakeUseOf. You can also find her writing on VentureBeat, The Next Web and ProductivityBytes.com.

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5 Benefits of Commercial IoT and Automation

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Some of the current applications of the Internet of Things feel more trivial than others. Humans have been outrunning each other for a hundred thousand years without the aid of internet-connected sneakers, for instance. And using telephones to close the blinds in our homes often feels like more, not less, work.

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The Internet of Things has strong military applications, connecting ships, planes, tanks, drones, soldiers, and operating bases in a cohesive network that increases situational awareness, risk assessment, and response time. IoMT involves the full realization of pervasive sensing, pervasive computing, and pervasive communication, leading to an unprecedented scale of information produced by the networked sensors and computing units

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Industrial internet of things (IIoT) is the use of smart sensors and actuators to enhance manufacturing and industrial processes. Also known as the industrial internet or Industry 4.0, IIoT uses the power of smart machines and real-time analytics to take advantage of the data that "dumb machines" have produced in industrial settings for years. The driving philosophy behind IIoT is that smart machines are not only better than humans at capturing and analyzing data in real time, but they're also better at communicating important information that can be used to drive business decisions faster and more accurately.

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Introduction

The term "the Industrial Internet of Things" is pervasive in the context of industry as digital transformation has become a business priority for many organizations. So, what is IIoT?

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), also known as the Industrial Internet, brings together critical assets, advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics, and modern industrial workers. It is the network of a multitude of industrial devices connected by communications technologies that results in systems that can monitor, collect, exchange, analyze, and deliver valuable new insights like never before. These insights can then help drive smarter, faster business decision-making for industrial companies.

IIoT has transformed industry-changing the way industrial companies operate from day-to-day. Whether it's enabling Industrial AI to detect corrosion inside a refinery pipe, providing real-time production data to uncover additional capacity in a plant, or accelerating new product development by feeding operations and service data back into the product design cycle, IIoT-and the software solutions powered by it-are driving powerful business outcomes.

By combining machine-to-machine communication with industrial data analytics, IIoT is driving unprecedented levels of efficiency, productivity, and performance. And as a result, industrial companies in power generation, oil & gas, utilities, manufacturing, aviation, and many other industries are experiencing transformative operational and financial benefits.

The term Industrial Internet

Who coined the term Industrial Internet?

GE coined the term Industrial Internet in late 2012. Leveraging the promise of the Industrial Internet, or IIoT, GE has been driving its own digital industrial transformation.

And, based on its experience and deep technology and industry expertise, GE is helping customers accelerate their digital transformation journeys with GE Digital's portfolio of industrial software applications that help them to solve their toughest challenges by putting industrial data to work.

With the industrial world primed for digitization, GE Digital is leveraging the power of the IIoT with software that transforms data into action by collaborating with customers, jumping into uncertainty, and applying rapid experimentation with speed and scale.

In building a world that works, we are using targeted Industrial AI technologies to transform industrial assets and systems so that they become more predictive, prescriptive, safer, intelligent and more profitable. This includes using Digital Twins, learning, living models that combine domain knowledge and physics with Industrial AI to detect, prevent, and predict critical issues in order to uncover insights that drive business value. And, the remote capabilities enabled by the Industrial Internet help critical industries manage assets, design functional systems and collect data from anywhere in the world.

IIoT solutions

How do I invest in the Industrial Internet?

For example, what if you could use advanced analytics to predict events before they happened? Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions help you increase asset reliability and availability while optimizing maintenance costs, mitigating operational risks, and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

What if you could use real-time visibility to recover production capacity and drive greater efficiency and optimization? With Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), you can digitize your manufacturing plant or factory with insights that optimize your processes.

What if you could help your operators know the right actions to take every time? That's where next-generation HMI/SCADA solutions can help you drive smart operator decisions with model-based high-performance HMI for faster response and development.

These IIoT solutions are helping companies drive big gains in productivity, availability, and longevity-making digital transformation for industrial organizations possible.

Comparison

The Industrial Internet vs. Internet of Things

One perspective is to think of the Industrial Internet as connecting machines and devices in industries such as oil and gas, power generation, and healthcare, where there is more at stake or where system failures and unplanned downtime can result in life-threatening or high-risk situations. On the other hand, the Internet of Things tend to include consumer-level devices such as heart monitoring fitness bands or smart home appliances. They are functional and can provide conveniences but do not typically create emergency situations if downtime were to occur.

For example, Digital Twin is a great example of how the Industrial Internet enables machines that "tell" operators how to optimize productivity or detect a failure before it occurs, potentially saving companies billions of dollars a year. On the other hand, the Internet of Things includes connected refrigerators that can purchase more milk and eggs online before they run out.

As the Industrial Internet connects critical machines, it can deliver powerful financial and operational outcomes. For example, one of our customers, a power company saves $.5MM annually by using our APM solution for predictive analytics to gain asset, plant and fleet reliability. A manufacturing customer increased capacity by 20% and reduced lead time to customer delivery, and improved traceability by leveraging our MES solutions.

As more and more data is created from increasingly connected machines, systems, and devices, the volume of critical and valuable insights to be realized and acted upon is limitless.

Accelerate your IIoT journey

Are you ready to accelerate your IIoT journey?

No matter where you are on your Industrial Internet journey, industrial software can deliver breakthrough business outcomes with simplicity, speed, and scale. Empower today's modern industrial workers, become more predictive and profitable with Industrial AI based solutions, and transform your business to solve your toughest challenges by putting industrial data to work. We can help.

Colin Parris, PhD

Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, GE Digital

As GE Digital's Chief Technology Officer, Colin Parris leads teams that work to leverage technologies and capabilities across GE to accelerate business impact and create scale advantage for digital transformation. He also champions strategic innovations and identifies and evaluates new, breakthrough technologies and capabilities to accelerate innovative solutions to solve emerging customer problems. Colin created and leads the Digital Twin Initiative across GE.

Unlocking insights from machine data

Advanced Distribution Management Solutions (ADMS)

Contact us

Let GE Digital show you how our IIoT software can enhance your operations

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Everything you need to know about IIoT | GE Digital

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Introduction The term "the Industrial Internet of Things" is pervasive in the context of industry as digital transformation has become a business priority for many organizations. So, what is IIoT? The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), also known as the Industrial Internet, brings together critical assets, advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics, and modern industrial workers.

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Primarily used for connectivity in smart cities.  Eg: infrastructure sensors and management systems. Smart infrastructure, enabled by technologies like IoT, offer numerous of advantages bringing serious cost savings and efficiencies. These kinds of data-driven environments, fuelled by connected devices and network connectivity, become a new attack surface for cyber threats.