Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1253723
44 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 not care about the fact that it's being used as an attack sensor, that pipe is no longer being monitored. Ransomware may hit the IoT mar- ket soon. Right now, we don't see ransomware as much as bots. Johnson: Do you have any parting thoughts, Mike? Landeck: What your readers will probably want is a panacea to say, "If you buy this device, then all my security needs will be taken care of." The guidance says there is no panacea. Stuxnet is an example where they did every- thing right. Even an air-gapped environment can still be hacked. While your readers may want a panacea, it goes back to principles. As a business owner, what are you afraid of? If you're afraid of your workers not being able to work, then you ought to invest in the endpoint protection against antiviruses for your phones, tablets, computers, etc. If you're worried about your data being stolen, you should invest in access control. Know what it is you have to lose. Under- stand what those losses are, as well as the most cost-effective way to protect them. On an ongoing basis, have audits to confirm that's still happening. We all have blind spots and miss things. Johnson: This has been very informative. Thank you for your time. Landeck: Thank you! SMT007 Landeck: Let's take it up a level and identify three categories: integ- rity, confidentiality, and availabil- ity. I'll start with integrity. Can an attacker log in and change things about you? Stuxnet was integrity. They logged in, changed things, and the machines overheated. Then, there are confidentiality breaches like we see with credit card thefts. They can log in and take things. The third category is availability. Ransomware wants to take a company offline. But if your business depends on your sensors con- necting and an attacker disrupts your factory's connection, do you have a redundant data con- nection? If you have all Acme sensors and you buy a non-Acme product, will the sensors still work? Instead of focusing on ransomware, my guidance would be focusing on availability. Let's say that with the pandemic, your work- ers can't come in. A smart factory is supposed to be hands-off or lights-out. What that means is it's completely people-free. During this pan- demic, how do you support even a hands-off, lights-out data-driven manufacturing center? The answer is if the bad guys can figure out how to monetize it, it will be a risk someday. If you're using a sensor that can be infected with ransomware, the bad guys will figure out how to do it. But if you're protecting it from the internet, you're doing better. With online devices, though, we haven't seen a lot of ransomware. The big threat we've seen is devices being converted to bots. Most of these sensors will have small CPUs and memories because they have to be inexpensive to make. We have seen attackers who are able to log in because the passwords aren't being changed properly. They're taking that sen- sor that's supposed to be monitoring a piece of pipe, for example. They log in and re-pur- pose that device from monitoring the pipe to sending out spam or digital requests as part of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Now, your sensor is no longer monitoring your pipe; it's part of an attack. And while you may