Surviving the IoT Cyberattack Pandemic

The Internet of Things is turning into a security nightmare." So wrote Thomas Ricker, a respected systems engineer and deputy editor of the The Verge, in describing the enormous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that disabled wide swaths of the Internet in late September 2016. This is no hyperbole. Mr. Ricker's statement succinctly describes the current state of Internet of Things devices' vulnerability to cyberattack and hacking. According to a leading report by Malwarebytes Labs, there were nearly 1 billion malware detections and incidents, affecting nearly 100 million devices in more than 200 countries, during the June to November 2016 period alone. The United States is the top country for ransomware detections, as Americans are targeted because of their wide accessibility to technology and their ability to pay the ransom