There was a time when the nature of your business is what made you a target for malicious actors. Banks, credit card companies, and so on were where the bad guys went because, to coin a phrase, that’s where the money was.
Today, the mere fact that you have computing resources of any type means you’re a target. Your perception that the size or nature of your business makes you an unattractive target for cyber criminals is just that: your perception, not how the bad guys think. That you don’t deal with money or billion-dollar trade secrets arguably makes you a better target because you’re probably not paying attention to the risk like banks or a fortune 500 company. Today anyone with any computing resources is at risk. Why? Cryptocurrency mining.
Today, the mere fact that you have computing resources of any type means you’re a target. Your perception that the size or nature of your business makes you an unattractive target for cyber criminals is just that: your perception, not how the bad guys think. That you don’t deal with money or billion-dollar trade secrets arguably makes you a better target because you’re probably not paying attention to the risk like banks or a fortune 500 company. Today anyone with any computing resources is at risk. Why? Cryptocurrency mining.
To create cryptocurrency requires a computer. Any computer. The more computers the better. The problem is that to make money (no pun intended) creating cryptocurrency these days you need computing resources on a larger scale than your home computer. All that computing power requires energy. For bitcoin in particular, the electrical power you need to consume to make coins costs more than the value of the coins you make. The solution? Hack other people’s computers so that you earn the coins, and they get stuck with the power bill.
I’m not just talking about PCs. A colleague bought some LED, Wi-Fi-enabled light bulbs that allowed him to control when and where the lights came on in his house through his mobile phone. A user of Senrio Insight at home, he noticed a significant increase in outbound connections to an Internet address in China.*
His light bulbs.
Turns out the small computer chips in the light bulbs he bought had bitcoin mining code on them, as well as the promised functionality of being able to adjust brightness. To reiterate: someone at a factory in China figured out how to get people around the world to make him rich by screwing in a lightbulb.
How many Wi-Fi-enabled anythings are in your office? How many connected devices in your business - IT and IoT? Every one of those devices is a computer that has the potential of being taken over by someone else to do something other than what it was intended to do. The value you get by exploiting IoT is undermined by the fact that you're making someone else money just by showing up to work. How do you figure out if that’s happening to you? If you’ve got a spare :30 seconds we can show you.
Know what's on your network, how it should behave, and when it mis-behaves in real-time. Act on that information using your existing tech-stack. Do all of this without putting a burden on your devices or your network, at line-speed, and at a global scale if necessary. See Senrio Insight in action, and start your evaluation today.
* The original version of this post attributed the detection of malicious activity to the user's power consumption, which was incorrect.
I’m not just talking about PCs. A colleague bought some LED, Wi-Fi-enabled light bulbs that allowed him to control when and where the lights came on in his house through his mobile phone. A user of Senrio Insight at home, he noticed a significant increase in outbound connections to an Internet address in China.*
His light bulbs.
Turns out the small computer chips in the light bulbs he bought had bitcoin mining code on them, as well as the promised functionality of being able to adjust brightness. To reiterate: someone at a factory in China figured out how to get people around the world to make him rich by screwing in a lightbulb.
How many Wi-Fi-enabled anythings are in your office? How many connected devices in your business - IT and IoT? Every one of those devices is a computer that has the potential of being taken over by someone else to do something other than what it was intended to do. The value you get by exploiting IoT is undermined by the fact that you're making someone else money just by showing up to work. How do you figure out if that’s happening to you? If you’ve got a spare :30 seconds we can show you.
Know what's on your network, how it should behave, and when it mis-behaves in real-time. Act on that information using your existing tech-stack. Do all of this without putting a burden on your devices or your network, at line-speed, and at a global scale if necessary. See Senrio Insight in action, and start your evaluation today.
* The original version of this post attributed the detection of malicious activity to the user's power consumption, which was incorrect.
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