Abusing the Internet of Things ─ Blackouts, Freakouts, and Stakeouts

The upcoming IoT age will blur the line between our physical and online lives. Attacks targeting our online spaces will put our physical security at risk. Traditionally, the attack vectors to our fundamental luxuries have required physical tampering, mostly because access to the infrastructure has been limited from the Internet. This is about to change with the upcoming disruption caused by a future with billions of “things” connected to the Internet.

In this book, we will take a fascinating look into abusing the most popular IoT-based devices already available in the market. We will take a look at how a simple attack can cause a perpetual blackout targeting LED lightbulbs, how bad security decisions have grossly violated the physical safety and privacy of families, and how the insecurity of powerful electric vehicles can put your life at risk.

The goal of this book is to demonstrate tangible risk in IoT devices that we are going to depend on more and more as time progresses. Once we begin to understand the cause of actual security vulnerabilities in devices today, we will begin to set the path for a future that will help us enable these devices to securely enhance and augment our lives.

Malicious attackers are already hard at work uncovering and exploiting these security defects and they will continue to find crafty avenues to abuse their knowledge every way they can. These attackers span the spectrum of curious college students to sophisticated private and state sponsored criminal gangs that are interested in terrorizing individuals and populations. The impact of security vulnerabilities in IoT devices can lead to mass compromise of privacy and cause physical harm. The stakes are high.