Shawn Key: Let’s call it the emerging threat, not the biggest threat. I’ve said many times that the Internet of Things is also the Internet of Threats, and my concern is that we have this mass propagation of new, untested devices, and everyone wants to be first in the market with capabilities. And while they like to use terms like “baked-in security,” the reality is that that isn’t happening. So, with thousands of new devices connecting every day, the hackers are always one step ahead.
And we’re putting infrastructure in place that’s just not secure. And I’ll give you a quick in-the-weeds example. Companies like mine frankly that are encouraged to be entrepreneurs and innovative, the investors pressure us to get out a minimum viable product (MVP). They’ll have the most basic functionality, get something out there so we can start getting a return on revenue, and we’ll figure out the rest in phase two as we go along.
The problem is if you’re putting out your most basic functionality, you’re not putting in the money into testing and security, and something is now in the wild that consumers are using that is very problematic. And, to tie this all in, I use the word “consumers” because the last big attack we saw that took a lot of press was the East to West shutdown of a lot of the social media networks.
And it wasn’t that the actual vendors themselves had been shut down. The availability had been killed because major internet routers had been compromised. And the primary source of this failure, or what contributed to these hackers, was a distributed denial of service that was occurring on all of these [pure data] set path devices, you know, that Comcast puts out: drives and files. So, you have all these unwitting soldiers, electronic soldiers if you will, that are contributing to the hackers’ mission, and the consumers didn’t have a clue. All they had to do was leave the device on. The fear…the “cyber Pearl Harbor”… is that it’s not going to be our social media that’s affected next; it’s going to be infrastructure.
You’re gonna see a city like Los Angeles go down. And, all of a sudden, now we don’t have power. And it’s not that we just don’t have computers. Your refrigerator’s not working, so your food’s spoiling. And everybody’s mass panicking and trying to get to the store and clearing them out. Maybe the grocery store has lost power, so everything’s getting ready to spoil. It’s going to affect your heating and air conditioning. That’s another thing to mention. All these smart devices, they are connected to the internet. So, what happens when somebody hacks that and they’re running it at 90 degrees heat in the winter or 60 degrees cool in the summer, and you can’t do anything about it?
