IoT boom 'prompts surge of security threats'TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Companies and governments eager to harness the internet of things' (IoT) enormous growth potential have rapidly produced millions of new devices that can be hijacked in service of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, security specialists said Friday. DDoS attacks launch a flood of incoming messages to a system, essentially forcing it to shut down and deny service to users. "New devices are being produced at an alarming scale," said John McCloskey, senior vice president of global sales at Akamai Technologies. "We found (that) 5.5 million new things are getting connected each day — a new army of attackers." Akamai's latest State of the Internet Security Report, which covers the third quarter of this year, says that DDoS attack volumes were up 71 percent compared with the same period last year.

Source: The China Post December 02, 2016 08:12 UTC