Researchers discover over 170 million exposed IoT devices in major US cities

Researchers have discovered more than 178 million Internet of Things (IoT) devices visible to attackers in the ten largest US cities. On Wednesday, researchers Numaan Huq and Stephen Hilt from Trend Micro  revealed at the RSA conference in San Francisco, California, that many IoT devices are lacking basic security and are visible using services such as the Shodan search engine, which is used to discover devices which are accessible from the Internet. One such example is the Mirai botnet that harnessed millions of vulnerable IoT devices to launch debilitating attacks against online services last year.