Analysis & Opinions - The Washington Post

Your WiFi-connected Thermostat Can Take Down the Whole Internet. We Need New Regulations.

| November 3, 2016

The government has to get involved in the “Internet of Things."

Late last month, popular websites like Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and PayPal went down for most of a day. The distributed denial-of-service attack that caused the outages, and the vulnerabilities that made the attack possible, was as much a failure of market and policy as it was of technology. If we want to secure our increasingly computerized and connected world, we need more government involvement in the security of the "Internet of Things" and increased regulation of what are now critical and life-threatening technologies. It's no longer a question of if, it’s a question of when.

First, the facts. Those websites went down because their domain name provider — a  company named Dyn — was forced offline. We don't know who perpetrated that attack, but it could have easily been a lone hacker....

Continue reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/03/your-wifi-connected-thermostat-can-take-down-the-whole-internet-we-need-new-regulations/

For more information on this publication: Please contact Cyber Project
For Academic Citation: Schneier, Bruce.“Your WiFi-connected Thermostat Can Take Down the Whole Internet. We Need New Regulations..” The Washington Post, November 3, 2016.

The Author

Recommended
In the Spotlight
RSS
A detailed look at China’s development of a hydrogen bomb in fewer than three years, quicker than all other initial nuclear weapons states.
'New Cold Wars' are “more complex, more dangerous than the old one, because China and Russia are teaming up together.”
While U.S. media reports blame Iran and its drone attacks for “pouring gasoline on a region that is already in flames,” there's a lot more to the story, and “most of it reflects poorly on the United States.”
Most Viewed

Tags