Internet of Things (IoT) is burgeoning the world towards digital transformation through its smart connected technology products and solutions. IoT being ubiquitous is poised to disrupt the way we live, work, and communicate leading to the culture of convenience and seamless life. IoT is all about connectedness, and the things/devices around us are always communicating with each other and are controlled remotely with a simple push of a button or via a voice command.
With the advent of IoT and next-gen growth, engines have opened up for critical Security Vulnerabilities. There is still a significant amount of gap in the IoT technology products and solutions which have proliferated the market. The “Satori Botnet” is one such major attack that has transpired since the Mirai’s Botnet attack which happened the same time last year.
Satori in Japanese refers to “Awakening” which is the Mirai Botnet’s successor. The Satori Botnet has potentially infected over 280,000 IP address in 12 hours enslaving thousands of home routers by exploiting the recent discovered zero-day vulnerability. Of these, the top three countries that are affected are Argentina (70%), Tunisia (15%), and Bulgaria (4%). From the time, the authors of Mirai made the botnet’s source code public last year, the cybercriminals have pushed out the new variants of Mirai botnet.
“According to a report at the Qihoo 360 Netlab, the security researchers found that the Satori botnet can propagate itself rapidly, which makes it essentially an IoT worm. Bleeping Computer also reported that instead of using a scanner to search for vulnerable routers, the botnet uses two exploits that attempt to connect to devices on ports 37215 and 52869.”
Dale Drew, chief security strategist at CenturyLink, told ArsTechnica that the Satori botnet has already infected two widely-used types of home routers by exploiting the recently-discovered zero-day flaw. By abusing the zero-day vulnerability in Huawei Home Gateway routers and Huawei’s Echolife Home Gateway devices. Satori was able to infect the routers which were secured with strong passwords.
Although it is still unclear whether it is the same hacker who operates both the botnets since, the researchers reported that both Mirai and Satori-based botnet shares the same file names, C2 protocols, and other key features. The scary picture is that the botnet operators are desperately trying to access to nodes numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not in millions.
To address or overcome these security IoT Vulnerabilities I provided a solution in my article on “Intranet of Things.” The Intranet of things will have a separate VPN which will provide an end-to-end solution that will connect all my devices, systems, network, and things collecting and integrating the data at the device level for data analytics and decision making. The connectivity happens through an internal network which is not connected to any external network or devices on the internet.
Through the Edge Computing Platform, the data will also be filtered at the device level itself eliminating the need for sharing the personal data that is not required to be shared with everyone protecting individual’s privacy and security. The personal data will only be shared which is mandated for use by the Government authorities and agencies alone. You can read my article on “Edge Computing” where I provided the need for using Edge Computing Platform for addressing the critical technology challenges faced by the Industry called “Data Deluge.”
To summarize, there is a dire need for the industry stakeholders to consider developing the robust, secure, cost-efficient IoT embedded technology solution of having secured and private “Intranet of Things and Edge Computing Platform” immediately for eradicating the risks of any cyber attacks in the future and putting an end to these cyber criminals once and for all.
