The China Post
Date: December 3, 2016
By: Christine Chou
Companies and governments eager to harness the enormous growth potential of the internet of things
Senior executives from Akamai Technologies Inc. pose for a photo in Taipei, Friday, Dec. 2. The content-delivery firm claims to be responsible for delivering nearly 30 percent of all web traffic. (Christine Chou, The China Post )
(IoT) have rapidly produced millions of devices that could be hijacked in the service of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, security specialists said Friday.
DDoS attacks launch a flood of incoming messages to a system, essentially forcing it to shut down and deny service to users.
“New devices are being produced at an alarming scale,” said John McCloskey, senior vice president of global sales at content-delivery and cyber-security firm Akamai Technologies.
“We found (that) 5.5 million new things are getting connected each day … We are seeing that most companies — even governments, are relaxing important network security rules, and that needs to stop.
“I believe strongly in IoT, but we need to bring to IoT the same security governance in other networks we use.”
According to studies by the firm, the number of connected objects globally is estimated at approximately 22.9 billion, and is expected to reach 50 billion by 2020.
Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Security Report, which covers the third quarter of this year, says that DDoS attack volumes were up 71 percent compared with the same period last year. [FULL STORY]
