Learning about the threat landscape

The Internet of Things (IoT) is all about data. You have hardware in the mix, but the hardware collects and transmits data.

The importance of data in this era has been compared to the importance of oil in the industrial era. Data is considered to be a valuable resource by most people. Data can be used for making predictions, such as the data collected from weather stations being used to forecast weather patterns.

Data collected from a smart home system can be used to understand user behavior, such as what appliances are being used at certain times leading you to understand room occupancy. A positive application of user behavior is targeted advertising. However, it is also possible to utilize data negatively. Knowing when a room is occupied implies that bad actors know when the room isn’t occupied.

Another example is with fitness trackers that collect location information. If this information falls into the wrong hands, it becomes...