TECH

IoT: There is a petition calling for laws to increase security in smart devices

The State of California has recently passed a cybersecurity law, adding a set of measures that make smart devices for home use (televisions, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, cars, door bells, and more) safer for users.The rules, which will take effect from 2020, require that all devices that connect (directly or indirectly) to the Internet must contain some security measures. The idea is that devices should prevent unauthorized access, being only accessed from a local network and with a password. And they must force users to change the factory default access credentials of each device.The petition goes forward with a similar bill to be applied in the European Community to prevent cases such as Mirai malware, which in 2016 prevented more than 100,000 people from gaining access to the Internet in the UK, and more than one million in the rest of Europe. Or Thingbot, which in December 2013 found hundreds of thousands of messages infected with viruses originating from smart home appliances, exploited because of the original factory password access.The petition calls for consideration by the European Parliament to create laws that deal with similar cases, but which are flexible enough not to strangle new technologies. In addition to the measures enacted by California law, experts also call for reducing the number of TCP / IP ports on the equipment to limit the risk of cross-injection of code from other sites. It is also necessary to consider mandatory installation of firewalls and anti-virus in IoT equipment and to ensure that intelligent equipment management interfaces are only accessible on local networks. The goal is to force manufacturers to introduce automatic firmware update methods.


Sapo