On 21 October of last year, a variety of major websites—including those of Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, Netflix, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal—stopped working. The cause was a distributed denial-of-service attack, not on these websites themselves but on the provider they and many others used to support the Domain Name System, or DNS, which translates the name of the site into its numerical address on the Internet. The DNS provider in this case was a company called Dyn, whose servers were barraged by so many fake requests for DNS lookups that they couldn’t answer the real ones. Distributed denial-of-service attacks are common enough. But two things made this attack special. First, it hobbled a large DNS provider, so it disrupted many different websites. Also, the fake requests didn’t come from the usual botnet of compromised desktop and laptop computers. Rather, the attack was orchestrated through tens of millions of small, connected devices, things like Internet-connected cameras and home routers—components of what is often called the Internet of Things, or IoT for short. For several years now, the number of things connected to the Internet—including phones, smart watches, fitness trackers, home thermostats, and various sensors—has exceeded the human population. By 2020, there will be tens of billions of such gadgets online. The burgeoning size of the Internet of Things reflects the fastest economic growth ever experienced for any sector in the history of human civilization. For the most part, this development promises great excitement and opportunity for engineers and society at large. But there is a dark cloud hanging over the IoT: the concomitant threats to security and privacy, which will be of a scale never experienced before. Our digital systems are vulnerable to malicious hackers attempting to gain unauthorized access, steal personal data and other information, hold the information they steal for ransom, and even bring systems down completely, as happened with the attack on Dyn. The result is an ongoing arms race between hackers and computer-security experts, forcing the rest of us to live on a treadmill of security updates to the software we run on our various computers. Click Here to read more