IoT News Weekly – June 24, 2022
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Z-Wave Makes Waves
Smart home standard designer, Z-Wave Alliance, announced late last week that they had officially surpassed 4000 certified devices. The key selling point of Z-wave technology is the interoperability of of the technology standard. The Z-Wave Alliance said that HOPPE AG, was the alliance member who received the 4000th certification.
Mitch Klein, the Executive Director of the Z-wave alliance said, “Z-wave has been at the forefront of security, interoperability, and backward compatibility for over two decades”
IIoT Growing Fast
On Monday a new market report about the industrial internet of things or IIoT was released by Technavio. According to the report the IIoT market is expected to grow by over $421 billion, that is a growth rate of almost 33%. Interestingly they say that 36% of the markets growth will come directly from the asia pacific region with China and Japan expected to be the key growth markets.
In fact, the report claims that APAC region will see faster growth in IIoT market share than any other regions in the world.
The primary driver for this growth is the rise of industrial automation which is utilized in processes such as food and beverage raw materials conversion, and a multitude of other industries where human interaction can me limited or elimited to improve throughput, efficiency, dependability, and safety. The biggest issue the industry will face as it grows is lack of security awareness and management of IoT systems.
Thales’ New 5G Modem
IoT systems manufacturer Thales is back in the news this week with the announcement of their new Cinterion MV32 Modem card. The new module enabled manufacturers to more efficiently develop and maintain resilitent, high-performance 5G devices. The new modem by Thales is designed to take full advantage of the speed and reliability of the global 5G network as well as provide equipped devices with security connectivity, secure teleconferences and telehealth, as well as intelligent energy use monitoring.
According to Thales the new modem is designed to be integrated into the next generation of smaller and more efficient IoT Devices. Finally, Thales says that they have built security into their devices by, quote, building on Thales’ security philosophy of robust cyber protection. They do go on to say that regular third party penetration testing is conducted but do not provide other details on the “built in security” so time will tell if it is marketing speak or atually effective.
Malware Rampant in IoT
On Tuesday, the Interisle Consulting Group announced the publication of their Malware Landscape 2022 paper. The report is a study of the scope and distribution of malware and has several pertinent insights for the IoT world. In the study they analyzed 2.5 million records from unique malware events between May 2021 and April 2022.
Issues such as what malware was more prevalent, where it was served from, and what resources criminals used in their attacks are some of the key areas the report covers.
Some key findings that are very relevant to IoT are: IoT devices, such as IP cameras, sensors, and embedded technologies, were the most frequently reported malware targets.
Asia-Paciic networks host 81% of all malware that targeting IoT Devices.
There is a lot more in the report if you would like To learn more about this see the link below in the description.
DOOM on a Lamp
Finally, we have some proof that SOME IoT devices CAN run third-party software, if it is a game from the 90’s. Over the last decade or so there have been numerous stories about hardware hackers who were able to make the video game DOOM run on low powered smart devices. We’ve seen Doom running on seemingly random items, like a pregnancy test, and a McDonald’s POS machine.
Well, a team at Next-hack, led my an engineer named Nicola Wrachien, were able to successfully run Doom on a $15 Ikea smart lamp.
Like most of these attempts they were able to get an old port of the game to run on relatively heavily modified hardware. For example they needed to install an extra 8mb of additional NAND flash storage as well as adding a screen and buttons to see and control the game. If you want to make Doom run on your old smart devices check out the link in the description below.
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