This article is an excerpt from our latest white paper "Active Fraud Prevention in the Industrial Internet of Things".
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Throughout the entire history of computer development, we will find that once a certain technology is used on a large scale, various malicious activities that take advantage of vulnerabilities in standards and specifications will be repeated.
For example, when many people owned PCs and used floppy disks to copy games, the copying and spreading of malicious virus code increased sharply; the emergence of Internet advertisements turned the virus from a niche geek behavior into a gray industry chain. It is understood that Internet advertising fraud The losses caused are in the billions every year.
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For a long time, the telecommunications industry has been deliberately combating online fraud and malicious behavior. Wildfires are endless and the spring breeze is blowing again. As the main business of telecommunications has shifted from analog services to digital services, fraud and malicious behavior have also developed rapidly. Because of this, the valuable experience and lessons provided by the telecommunications industry can help us prevent industrial products. Malicious behavior on the
Internet . Although the protocol is developed by standards organizations such as 3GPP and used for data service interaction between systems, the road is one foot high, and the magic is high. The standard and protocol definition itself cannot really distinguish between normal business behavior and malicious behavior. This phenomenon is unavoidable in most industries, and so is the Industrial Internet of Things.
Therefore, if we look at the development of telecommunications technology...
- Specialized "firmware" devices have been replaced by cheap general-purpose products. Special functions (virtualization, containerization, etc.) are now enabled through software
- Now, intelligence is integrated into the software to make it more responsive and quicker to update and patch
- Although enabling software functions means that the system is more vulnerable to malicious attacks, it also means that in addition to meeting normal functional requirements, it can also be modified to deal with these threats
…We can see the same progress in the Industrial Internet:
- Professional (and expensive) equipment has been replaced by cheap general-purpose sensors
- An article predicts: By 2022, we may see devices priced below $6
- As with telecommunications companies, the reason for this shift is that intelligence is shifting from device firmware to control software. In other words, the industrial Internet devices themselves are becoming clumsy and relying on cloud interaction to provide intelligence, which creates the same vulnerabilities we see elsewhere
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Although we are culturally inclined to treat computer issues as the work of a single participant, the reality is that over time, unauthorized access spawns a gray industrial chain and a complex ecosystem. There are "botnets available for rent" on the Internet, which allow you to access other people's infected devices in batches. The telecommunications company has a complete "SIM Boxing" system that allows you to bypass international call charges. Due to the huge amount of money involved and the difficulty of filing a lawsuit, the intervention of professional criminals is inevitable.
Based on this situation, it would be naive to assume that there is no need for advanced, automated, and real-time supervision of the Industrial Internet. If history is a mirror, we can expect to see the emergence of specialized services dedicated to protecting the industrial Internet. There is no denying that security will become an important part of the total cost.
Download our latest white paper to learn about the four basic functions that successfully prevented Industry 4.0 from becoming Intrusion 4.0.
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