Oct 25, 2018
Smart cities: 'A cyber-attack could stop the country'
Superfast 5G mobile broadband could power smart cities and the internet of things, but as more devices get connected, telecoms and security experts are warning that cyber-attacks could increase in number and severity. "Security around IoT devices hasn't been very good, so if they're opened up to better connectivity they're opened up to more hackers, too," says Cody Brocious, education lead at security consultancy HackerOne. Steve Buck, chief operating officer at telecoms security company Evolved Intelligence, goes so far as to say that "5G will power critical infrastructure, so a cyber-attack could stop the country." Cody Brocious believes you could stop "99% of hacker attacks" on IoT devices by "Preventing inbound connections" to them, routing the communications through an intermediary server, most likely operated by the device manufacturer. As many IoT device makers won't bother spending the extra money beefing up security on their devices, Cisco and other security firms are switching to monitoring how devices behave on a network - the typical data they send and receive, the patterns of traffic - and looking for anomalies.
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