When Refrigerators Attack - How Cyber Criminals Infect Appliances, and How Manufacturers Can Stop Them

Alan Grau, VP of IoT, Embedded Systems, Sectigo

Homes and businesses worldwide are vulnerable to attacks from cyber thieves and other bad actors – and not just through their computer networks. The embedded electronics inside appliances present an easy path of entry. It’s already been happening. According to Business Insider and Proofpoint, one of the first refrigerator incidents occurred in late 2013 when a refrigerator-based botnet was used to attack businesses.

Some of these attacks, such as infecting appliances with botnet malware, don’t really have much effect upon a family’s security and safety. In fact, if a “smart” refrigerator gets infected by a bot, the homeowner might not even notice anything wrong.

However, connected-appliance based cyberattacks are not limited to just refrigerators – and they are rarely one-off incidents. Almost any type of appliance can be hacked and used to host a botnet that could attack the web. According to Wired Magazine, a botnet of compromised water heaters, space heaters, air conditioners and other big power consuming home appliances, could suddenly turn on simultaneously, creating an immense power draw that could cripple the country’s power grid.

A bot, quite simply, is an infected computer. Many cyberattacks, like the Mirai Malware and the Dyn attacks, infect a network of computers, including “smart” connected devices such as home appliances, security cameras, baby monitors, air conditioning/heating controls, televisions, etc., and turn them all into compromised servers. These compromised servers then act as nodes in an attack and together create a botnet. They can participate in a variety of coordinated attacks, infecting other devices and expanding the network of bots, or participating in Denial of Service attacks.

Caption: A bad actor or cyber criminal can send infected messages to a home or business network that targets various appliances or machines. Once infected, that machine is under the control of the bad actor and can be used to send out thousands of infected messages to new targets worldwide. The botnets can also send out millions of dummy messages to a single target – overwhelming it and putting it out of service. 

Without any apparent symptoms or notice, a criminally enhanced refrigerator could be generating and sending out thousands of attacks every minute. In addition to the homeowner or business manager never realizing what is going on, these attacks may be unstoppable until unless the machine itself is disconnected from its web connection.

Additionally, the infected refrigerator could spread malware from the kitchen to the home’s “smart” TVs, to the home’s computer networks, to other smart devices in the home, and even to connected smart phones. Every target could be transformed into malicious bots that distribute millions of infected spam messages and cyber-attacks.

So how do we combat this threat?

Unfortunately, end users really have no power to fix this problem. There is probably no way for a homeowner, office manager – or even an experienced refrigerator repair person – to talk to a refrigerator’s electronics. No way to get into the appliance’s software and middleware to identify and kill an infection. However, if the homeowner suspects an infection, they could disconnect the refrigerator from the its internet connection to make it “dumb” again.

Fridge caught sending spam emails in botnet attack - In the first documented attack of its kind, the Internet of Things has been used as part of an attack that sent out over 750,000 spam emails

It is up to device manufacturers to protect against these attacks. 

So how do manufacturers combat this type of attack? How can they ensure that appliances in homes and offices do not get infected to cause mayhem?

Security starts in the design process for the refrigerator itself, as well as for the appliances’ various electronic components and control surfaces. Most appliance manufacturers get their control sub-assemblies from a wide network of smaller manufacturers, sometimes with a worldwide supply chain. These suppliers need to make sure that the chips and sub-assemblies they use are secure from hacks.

Two important security practices can be utilized by appliance makers:

• Embedded Firewall with blacklist and whitelist support – Protect appliances and edge devices from attacks by building firewall technology directly into the appliance. An embedded firewall can review incoming messages from the web or over the home network and, via a built in, and regularly updated blacklist, reject any that are not previously approved.

• Secure Remote Updates and Alerts – Validate that the firmware inside the device is authenticated and unmodified before permitting installation of any new firmware updates. Updates ensure the incoming software components have not been modified and are authenticated software downloads modules from the appliance manufacturer.

Most consumer and device manufacturers have heard about the potential for attacks on smart devices like door locks, baby monitors, and home thermostats, but this risk awareness needs to expand to types of connected systems – including appliances. An infected refrigerator sending out malware is not just a funny story. These systems have been attacked and used to spread malware.  Ensuring the security of these devices is necessary to protect home network, slow the spread of malware and even protect credit card numbers or other personal data stored in smart home devices.

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EXTRA PROOF POINT FOR COLUMN

Refer to: https://www.cnet.com/news/fridge-caught-sending-spam-emails-in-botnet-attack/

 Author Bio - Alan Grau, VP of IoT, Embedded Solutions, Sectigo

Alan has 25 years of experience in telecommunications and the embedded software marketplace. He is VP of IoT, Embedded Solutions IoT at Sectigo, the world’s largest commercial Certificate Authority and provider of purpose-built, automated PKI solutions. Alan joined Sectigo in May 2019 as part of the company’s acquisition of Icon Labs, a leading provider of security software for IoT and embedded devices, where he was CTO and co-founder, as well as the architect of Icon Labs' award-winning Floodgate Firewall. He is a frequent industry speaker and blogger and holds multiple patents related to telecommunication and security.

Prior to founding Icon Labs, Alan worked for AT&T Bell Labs and Motorola.  He has an MS in computer science from Northwestern University.

About Sectigo

Sectigo provides award-winning, purpose-built and automated PKI management solutions to secure websites, connected devices, applications, and digital identities. As the largest commercial Certificate Authority, trusted by enterprises globally for more than 20 years, and more than 100 million SSL certificates issued in over 200 countries, Sectigo has the proven performance and experience to meet the growing needs of securing today’s digital landscape. For more information, visit www.sectigo.com.

The Internet of Things promises a smart, fully-connected world where physical objects and services are interlinked to benefit society. According to a Statista report, by 2020 the number of IoT-enabled devices worldwide will reach 30.73 billion. From smart home appliances to connected medical devices to self-driving cars — we are moving full steam ahead towards the Internet of Everything.

But such ubiquitous connectivity raises many concerns regarding safety, and rightfully so. In October 2016, Mirai, arguably the most infamous IoT botnet, caused major disruptions and resulted in several high-profile Internet services inaccessible. 

With the continuously expanding IoT attack surface, the existing security practices often fall short. To address the new threat landscape, engineers harness the power of machine and deep learning to deliver robust, secure IoT solutions for a safer connected world.

Network traffic analysis

The sheer amount and diversity of IoT devices make it extremely difficult for network administrators to reliably monitor M2M and M2H interactions. Various network communication protocols — Bluetooth, Zigbee, WiFi, LoRaWAN, MQTT — add another layer of complexity.

To tackle the challenge at hand, researchers are leveraging machine learning to analyze IoT device traffic and establish legitimate behavioral profiles. Trained to recognize baseline behavior, ML algorithms can successfully detect any traffic anomalies and intrusions. Unsupervised learning goes further and detects even previously unseen attacks, helping to boost IoT security.

Botnet activity detection

The above mentioned Mirai botnet managed to infect over 600,000 IoT devices to pull off one of the largest DDoS attacks on record. The thing with IoT botnets is that they work silently, without compromising the infected device performance..

Traditional signature-based botnet detection methods prove ineffective as bots with slightly different signatures can go undetected. The same goes for zero-day attacks. Deep learning, in its turn, has the potential to improve botnet detection and enhance cybersecurity. As one of the options, researchers suggest using deep autoencoders — unsupervised neural networks — that can learn complex patterns and detect infected IoT devices with low false alarm rates.

IoT device authentication

Viewed as the first line of security, authentication ensures that users and devices can be trusted to be what they declare to be. In large IoT ecosystems with millions of connected devices, strong authentication becomes as important as it is challenging.

In addition to network heterogeneity and complexity, limited computational ability and power of IoT-enabled devices do not allow using traditional authentication techniques. Minimal storage capacity of embedded systems also contributes to the complexity.

Machine learning offers new capabilities in enforcing secure authentication and improving resistance to identity-based spoofing attacks. Recent researches demonstrated the success of deep learning-based RF fingerprinting for highly accurate IoT device identification based on RF emissions. 

IoT access management

Another pillar in IoT security, access control helps keep unauthorized users and devices away from protected network resources. Given the complexity of IoT ecosystems and enormous amounts of IoT-generated data, static, context-unaware access control rules cannot ensure adequate levels of protection.

Keeping in mind these limitations, a reinforcement learning model can be applied to dynamically optimize access control policy. The model continues to improve over time and takes into account multiple contexts that smart devices are used in. The authors also suggest leveraging blockchain technology to provide a distributed access control architecture that can be a better fit for a decentralized IoT environment.

Summing up

As the number of connected devices is growing at a breathtaking pace, IoT security remains top of mind for manufacturers, enterprises, and consumers alike. An IoT ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link. Without proper security in place, an infected IoT device cannot only compromise thousands of others but give access to your personal information or participate in a massive DDoS attack. 

New security threats and vulnerabilities require new approaches, and machine learning lends itself well to the challenge. From detecting anomalous behavior of IoT devices to accurate fingerprinting to adapting access control policy, machine and deep learning help enhance IoT security.

The way businesses are carried out today has changed at the fundamental level with IoT. By connecting sensors and devices with the internet, we have reached a new height of progress and innovation, which was not previously possible. This new height is all about data connectivity, analytics, and automation. In the coming times, we will see more of IoT enabled devices and systems getting common in our lives due to the traction gained in terms of home automation and industries. The industries which understand the potential of IoT implementation are more likely to flourish and drive innovation in the niche during the next decade.

What is IoT?

IoT stands for Internet of Things which can be called as a network of physical objects which communicate and interact with each other as well as their environment through an internet connection. This simply means that with more number of devices around us being connected over the internet, it will enable companies to control them remotely, collect more amounts of data as well as enable automation.

The effect of IoT has increased drastically across different industries today. The way IoT has revolutionized them and is playing a key role in its progress has to be well noted.

IoT in Manufacturing

The contribution of IoT in the manufacturing industry is very high and you can say that it is the one that enjoys the highest IoT investment. The investment is taking place at two levels. One is working towards cost reduction and optimizing systems called as inward facing and the other is towards improving customer usage called as outward facing. 

Manufacturers are making use of IoT to carry on predictive maintenance, optimize their processes and to monitor equipment. In order to enhance the productivity and efficiency of manufacturing operations, the use of IoT devices in terms of smart manufacturing is playing a huge role. Smart manufacturing is all about making the existing manufacturing equipment equipped with sensors. This may not be required with the new manufacturing equipment as they have such sensors pre-installed. 

Smart planning is all about offering the supply chain with the smart floor. Information can be captured in real-time and actionable insights can be put to use. Smart manufacturing is all about covering each and every area in manufacturing, which includes plant operations, inventory control product design, demand & supply management, etc. With smart manufacturing, manufacturers get complete visibility of the business which helps them to optimize the supply and demand chain while streamlining the business processes. 

IoT in Transportation

If we try to look into IoT investment, then you will find that IoT holds the second highest position in this arena. One of the best gifts that we have from IoT is self-driving cars. Some of the big names in the industry like Uber, BMW, Ford, GM, and Google have been heavily investing in this area to make use of innovative technologies to come up with self-driving cars. Such kind of self-driving cars will simplify transportation, reduce pollution and even save more lives by preventing accidents. 

More number of public transportation and freight vehicles is using sensors to optimize fuel consumption, schedule maintenance and fleet management. Even some of the vehicles come with digital data recorders which record driving under heavy acceleration so as to indicate the driver of any fatal accidents which might occur. 

IoT in Agriculture

By using IoT technologies, farming and agriculture have been able to make greater benefits. With the help of IoT device installations, the farmers are able to collect valuable data which reveals about their livestock and crops in a number of ways. They can survey land using drones and even measure the resources available on the farms. When all these things come together, it helps the farmers with a new way of carrying out things like precision farming. The role of IoT in agriculture and farming will increase significantly as the demand for food keeps on increasing. 

IoT impacting Healthcare

As per many experts, it has been said that the healthcare industry is going to be one of the main areas where spending on IoT will be considerably high. We already have a number of equipment which does things in a better way like share patient reports and images, helps with ICU management, real-time location systems, finding problems and troubleshooting and medicine dispensing. It is possible for IoT to streamline the data coming from medical service providers and send them back with the help of technologies like mobility solutions and wearables. 

When medical devices are connected with IoT sensors, the doctors will get right information delivered that too with reduced errors. This positively affects the quality of service and diagnosis process. The use of smart beds is also increasing across a number of hospitals. Such beds are capable of sensing the patient and adjusting it automatically so as to offer proper support. 

Improving patient care at homes is possible using IoT applications. Smart medication dispensers can notify the patient automatically when it is time to take the medicines and can also be used to upload the reports on the cloud platform for the doctors to check and make changes in the dose. 

IoT has proved itself and so it is going to stay here for a long time. The use of IoT across the healthcare industry will keep improving as they are looking for better ways to leverage technology so as to improve efficiency. With data sharing becoming simpler in the coming times, the use of IoT applications across the sector will grow too. 

IoT in Retail

What if one day you don’t have to worry about the shortage of supplies in your fridge? What if it can order the items on its own when the stock in the fridge starts to go low? The potential of IoT in the retail industry is high. It is time for us to face smart retailing. A smart supply chain which is based on IoT already exists. There are applications for automated delivery systems, real-time inventory management, product tracking, auto-billing, etc. and here, new trends are visible fast. 

With a smart retail store, it is possible to analyze and understand the shopping journey of the customers through footfalls. Earlier, businesses carried out long surveys to understand the market demands and this was an expensive affair. Now the use of foot-traffic monitoring has increased as a part of smart stores to analyze the areas where the customer is having a problem with finding goods and which are the best selling products. This way it will become possible to assign an executive to the customer so as to help with quick shopping. Based on store traffic monitoring, businesses can improve the in-store shopping experience. This way, by making use of mobile devices, retailers will have a better chance to engage customers and implement new digital marketing strategies. 

With the online marketplace growing exponentially, retailers are looking for ways to grab the attention of the customers and bring them to their stores. For the same, they need to get their hand on data and analytics, which can help them increase footfalls. Based on the data and analytics, IoT can help retailers make the right decisions. Keeping it short, retailers should focus on using IoT applications which can be used to serve the customers in an enhanced manner. 

IoT in Fintech

When we talk of fintech businesses or financial services organizations, their main concern is security. This is the reason why they depend on the network of visual sensors and cameras, which can offer them reliable facilities. When it comes to IoT deployment, the financial services organizations are quite good in numbers and even they are good at visual analytics adoption. Financial companies are going for mobile phones as their endpoint choice along with sensors and cameras. When it comes to IoT implementation, financial forms have many goals to achieve, but the main one is to have better connectivity for their networks as well as employ greater security for their services. 

IoT in Smart Homes & Buildings

IoT has greatly influenced the way we live and work. If we talk about living space, IoT has brought to light the concept of the smart home automation system. This system is all about different connected products which work towards making life more convenient, more comfortable and more pleasant. By using intelligent homes, it becomes possible for the homeowners to build up a pleasant environment within the four walls while working towards efficient energy management and enhanced security through proper customization. To build and monitor smart homes, a number of IoT technologies are available. 

Some of the leading consumer product manufacturing companies in the market are Philips, Haier, and Amazon. You can get news headlines to read to you while you are working, by asking Alexa, the voice assistant of Amazon Echo. 

A perfect example of a smart home design is Philips Hue. This bulb offers you 600 to 800 color lumens to choose from. It can change based on your mood. This product is compatible with other smart home platforms like Apple’s iPhone Home Kit and Amazon Echo. 

In the coming years, the number of smart home devices is going to go high. The smart appliances will includes washing machines, refrigerators, TV, dryers, etc. Then you have smart home energy equipment which provides for thermostats and smart lighting while smart home security systems which include cameras, sensors, alarm systems, etc. Saving energy and reduction in electricity costs can be seen as the major advantage of IoT implementation in smart home concept. 

IoT impact on energy

One of the early adopters of IoT is the utility industry. It is possible to make a better recording of energy consumption using smart meters. This will help the companies offering utility services to efficiently and accurately bill their customers based on consumption. 

Moreover, with the help of smart meters, it will become possible to track down and send back to the grid the amount of energy the users of green technologies consume. And based on that, credit them and pay some incentives as a part of encouraging them towards using environment-friendly options. 

Conclusion

If you are looking for the next level of automation, then IoT is the answer. In the coming time, IoT implementation will become more comfortable with the innovation of new technologies and it will make things faster and secure too. This makes life better at home, as well as at work. IoT is adding in more and more things to the digital environment and it is to make everything easy right from smart kitchen to smart offices, smart traffic to smart parking spaces.

Let's be honest. Numerous individuals are resistant to technological changes in both their own lives and at the workplace. However, what they regularly need is the vision to perceive how the new technology they are opposing will improve their lives later on.

Blockchain has risen out to turn into the best game-changer for worldwide businesses. Upcoming and budding business people have understood the genuine capability of the blockchain. One of the most excited and discussed technology in the business world right now is Blockchain technology. More than 25 Industry sections have understood the genuine capability of this technology and keenly look forward to relating with the right technology partner.

Bitcoin, and the blockchain technology behind it, didn't disrupt the world as was at first idea when Satoshi Nakamoto published his invention in 2009. More recently, in any case, the blockchain has turned out to be one of the most generally discussed buzzwords, in the payment industry as well as over various industries. Truth be told, some accept that blockchain technology could eventually be more vital than the web.

Industries that are evolving Blockchain Technology

The first application of blockchain technology is digital cash like Bitcoin. The capability of blockchain technology lies in its versatility for a wide assortment of blockchain applications and use cases across many industries. Take a look at industries that blockchain is ready to disrupt:

1. Banking

Ironically banks are currently beginning to grasp blockchain technology, even though cryptocurrencies were first made to wipe out the reliance and trust on monetary intermediaries. Banks play an intermediary to a pack of financial services over the world, and blockchain technology banking will change the idea of numerous daily bank tasks throughout the following decade.

By utilizing blockchain, transferring assets between two parties that are situated on opposite sides of the world work as though they were directly nearby to one another. Blockchain technology in banking could likewise help banks move currency inside their organizations. Banks could build up their own managed cryptocurrencies to replace traditional dollars.

2. Manufacturing

The specialists expressed that the blockchain in the manufacturing business sector is anticipated to be worth around $30 million by 2020, and the market will keep on developing at a yearly development rate of 80 percent, to $566 million by 2025. Other real cryptographic money markets like Japan and South Korea have been empowering the development of blockchain in manufacturing technology and usage of decentralized systems across different businesses.

3. Industry Applications

Since blockchain technology is encrypted and decentralized, it is in effect broadly investigated for building up such platforms to encourage distributed and business communications. Starting today, the tide of time is by all accounts for decentralized and encrypted messaging applications. For example, Telegram, one such encoded application for messaging, is settling the adoption of blockchain industry applications for different purposes.

4. Blockchain in Food Industry

Imagine you could follow the source of your food like a minute or if you could check if the natural products you bought were really natural. This could really occur sooner rather than later, with blockchain technology set to make its debut in the food business.

Blockchain can help in many ways of view through:

Food safety: Blockchain helps in making the food supply chain transparent and furthermore engages the chain to know about any food safety disasters. This is one reason why associations like Unilever and Nestle are thinking about utilizing blockchain technology. By utilizing it, buyers would most likely follow the causes of specific products to prove their credibility.

Preventing Fraud: It would likewise help in preventing fraud if the information gathered is free of any human error. Actualizing blockchain would help in preventing these issues. It would likewise help in distinguishing the offender if a culprit is made.

Simpler and Quicker Payment: Blockchain would accelerate the payment procedure. It would help farmers in selling more and being repaid appropriately as the market information would be readily available. It could likewise prevent the occurrence of retroactive payments and price intimidation.

The smart technology of IoT or Internet of Things is really changing the technological landscape from all aspects. It is a network of connected devices that work through exchanging data between each other through a cloud network.

IoT technology has had a deep impact on the world of technology and web development is one of them. You might ask how these two things are connected, well, as it turns out, IoT devices need to work with web development because it needs both a front-end and back-end development, and that is where web development comes in. in the past few years, IoT has changed the web development in a lot of ways. Here are a few examples of that. 

• Continuous Website Optimization

Internet of Things is a constantly evolving sector and there is no possibility of this stopping soon. And that is why the web developers have to constantly keep on optimizing their websites to match the evolving nature of the website. This is the only true way to stay relevant in the industry of IoT.

• Raising The Bar On The Expertise

IoT has definitely increased the bar on the expertise when it comes to the knowledge of coding and framework. IoT developers need better knowledge of web development languages and database management. 

This need for advanced knowledge has definitely raised the bar for the developers to enter the game. They can’t just start with web development with just JavaScript knowledge anymore. They need serious knowledge of coding today. That’s hiring a reliable web development company in NYC is a necessity. 

• Speed Of Data Transaction

The traditional data process is through request analysis by web servers. But this process is not useful when it comes to IoT. for IoT devices, the data transaction speed is much higher and that is why the traditional process is replaced by the cloud data transmission process. This way the devices work faster by transmitting data faster.

• Need For An Increase In Security

IoT devices are more prone to get hacked and manipulated by hackers. And that is why web developers have to up their security game. A normal security protocol for web development is not enough for IoT devices. They need stricter security design pattern for the connected device's network to keep it safe for the users. You can follow the best practices for mobile app security here as well. 

• Power Management Needs

On an IoT network, the programs that run in the background drain a lot of power. This results in decreased communications and work. And that is why web developers have to design the layout in such a way that it will minimize the amount of power being used. Before you go forward with the web development plan for IoT device network, you have to design a power management plan.

• Dynamic UI

The normal UI design process by web developers has changed a lot due to the IoT industry. And that is why the developers have to rethink their UI development approach. Following the best practices to develop IoT based designs is the right way to go for web developers today. 

The impact of IoT is all-encompassing and even web development is not out of its impact. The developers have to change the normal practices they used to follow to match pace with the constantly evolving process of Internet of Things. Above mentioned are only a few ways IoT is effecting web development. The impact is even deeper than you think and it is going to get even deeper with time. 

For years, I have been written about the promise and perils of the Internet of Things (IoT). In many of my articles I described how the IoT could help transform society and kickstart the next industrial revolution. However, I think after talking these summer days with people outside this "industry" that most of them are lost with the IoT. We still cannot define in a unique and clear way what IoT is and much less explain how thanks to IoT it will change our lives, without using the example of the connected refrigerator.

At the beginning of 2015, I wondered if we would be able to build the Internet of Things. Taking a look at the most recent IoT Landscape I continue seeing how the fragmentation of the market, the lack of standards and the challenge of security continue damaging the growth of IoT. The evolution that not the revolution of IoT, has been slower than I expected and desired. Today not only Telcos admit IoT is failing to meet expectations.

Why are we lost in IoT? Let´s see some arguments.

Lost in IoT connectivity

With so many IoT connectivity options on the market, choosing the right one for your project can be complicated. It scares me to think that billions of devices will be connected in a few years to decentralized IoT networks and with no interconnectivity between them, unless we use millions of edge nodes that transfer messages among devices connected in multiple networks. If it is already difficult to justify the ROI of a use case considering a single type of connectivity, it is almost impossible to justify that these devices can communicate with other devices on different IoT subnets.

In case we consider the doubt small, we add the issue of end-to-end security and the need in some use cases networking in meshes with no single point of failure. Here comes new IoT technologies such as Blockchain to help or to confuse.

It seems that it is easy to get lost among so much connectivity technology. Isn’t true?

Suggested read: IoT Connectivity Options: Comparing Short-, Long-Range Technologies

How will Edge computing impact the global connectivity landscape?

Lost among hundreds of IoT Platforms

At least we already intuit some of the platforms that will survive among the +700 that some analysts have identified. I have only been able to analyze with more or less depth about 100. Surely my methodology of Superheroes and Supervillanos will advance the end of most of them.

It is no longer just one IoT Platform, stupid! Although they want to make it easy for us, companies like AWS, Microsoft or Google add concepts such as Serverless, Data Lakes, AI, Edge Computing, DLT and all the artillery of Cloud services to the core features of the IoT platform. I get lost in its architecture and I feel that if I get too close to one of these black holes, they will end up absorbing me.

Glad to know that “Verizon retools ThingSpace IoT platform to focus on connectivity” and system integrators are they are abandoning their in house development to embrace leaders vendors’ products.

The IoT analysts are also not helping much with its reports. IoT Platform vendors are disputing relevant positions in their graphs but we are lost when do not see any vendor in the leader quadrant of Gartner and most of them are Niche Players.

Lost between the Edge and the Clouds

In “Do not let the fog hide the clouds in the Internet of Things” , I warned about the degree of complexity that Fog / Edge Computing added to the already complex solutions in the IoT Clouds. Now nothing seems to be of great value if we do not include Edge Computing in our IoT solutions. And there our confusion arises again.

The Babel tower of Alliance & Consortiums is consolidating but we keep losing in acronyms. Industrial Internet companies felt relief with the news “ – The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) and the OpenFog Consortium® (OpenFog) unite to combine the two largest and most influential international consortia in Industrial IoT, fog and edge computing. While The Open Group Open Process Automation™ Forum (OPAF) is defining the next generation edge computing standards for industrial operators.

And again, the question arises, do we wait or start my Industrial IoT project? For now, I choose "Industrial IoT - Edge Computing Vendors Overview"​ as my first book. You can read my post here. 

Lost in the Proof of Concept (PoC)

Businesses are spending $745 billion worldwide on IoT hardware and software in 2019 alone. Yet, three out of every four IoT implementations are failing.

Microsoft launched a new research report — IoT Signals — intended to quantify enterprise internet of things (IoT) adoption around the world. The survey of over 3,000 IT team leaders and executives provides a detailed look at the burgeoning multi-billion-dollar segment’s greatest challenges and benefits, as well as related trends. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that 30% of respondents say their IoT projects failed in the proof-of-concept stage, often because the implementation became too expensive or the bottom-line benefits were unclear.

There are technical reasons for example the use of Rasberry Pi or Arduino boards in the PoC and realise that you need other more expensive hardware for the project.

There are economic reasons when you try to escalate your PoC to real implementations and then the ROI doesn’t look as well as in the pilot.

There are organization reasons when leaders are failing to go all in. If you can’t get the CEO on board, then the probability to finish in the PoC is almost 100%.

If you are lost in the PoC, these tips can help you implementing IIOT.

1. Solve a problem worth solving
2. Keep it quick and simple
3. Manage the Human Factor

Sources: https://internetofthingsagenda.techtarget.com/blog/IoT-Agenda/Break-out-of-IoT-proof-of-concept-purgatory

https://www.avnet.com/wps/portal/us/resources/technical-articles/article/iot/5-signs-proof-concept-purgatory/

https://titoma.com/blog/industrial-iot-avoid-pilot-purgatory

Microsoft: 30% of IoT projects fail in the proof-of-concept stage

Lost in select the right IoT Ecosystems

In Harbor Research article “ Has Anyone Seen A Real Internet of Things Ecosystem?” ,dated November 2013, the analyst firm wrote that no really significant ecosystem or network of collaborators had emerged in the IoT arena in spite there was early and very interesting efforts being made by several players. This article does not need changes.

Since I wrote “The value of partnership in Industrial Internet of Things”, I have heard, read and repeated hundreds of times how important it is to belong to an IoT ecosystem and how difficult it is to choose the one that suits you best.

All or at least most of those who read my articles know that there is no company in the world, no matter how great it is, it can do everything in IoT. Creating an IoT ecosystem either horizontal (technology) or vertical (industry) requires a lot of talent managers able to maintain win-win transactions over the time. And according to the results, it seems to me that it is becoming very complicated.

I am working in an article in which I will analyse 4 examples of IoT ecosystems that represent a big portion of the value chain in the multiple IoT markets: IoT Hardware Ecosystem, IoT telco Operator, IoT Cloud Platform Vendor and IoT System Integrators. Hope this article could help you, if you are lost with IoT ecosystems.

https://dblaza.blogspot.com/2014/04/will-strong-iot-ecosystem-beat-out-push.html

Remember, you are not the only one lost in IoT

When it comes to achieving a return on their investment from IoT, businesses really need rethink how they are deploying it so that they can manage remotely and secure their assets, use the sensors and devices data to make better real time decisions and be able to monetise it. However, for both to happen, and for IoT project to not end up in the purgatory, businesses need independent and expert advice at several levels to find the right people to lead the project and the right technology and partners to make implementation successful.

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Last year's Cambridge Analytica scandal has developed to the point in which many different big data-related problems and strategies have surfaced "the mainstream". The fact that many independent marketing agencies and enterprises started valuing data points is indeed the starting point in regards to the usage of big data and data-related algorithm in digital marketing. Let's analyse how, after GDPR, this is still a gold mine for agencies.

What Are Data Points?

With Data Points we define those packages which combine cookies, site's preferences and searches, combined together in alphanumerical strings which are then processed by native tools by many companies who are working with data science.
Data points have been used by Cambridge Analytica to set up campaigns like the Trump campaign and the Brexit one, resulting in over 80% engagement from their facebook ads, the reason why both campaigns were extremely successful, for such delicate matters.

The Machine Learning Side Of Data

In 2018, it has been stated that there was a drastic increase in hiring Python developers in digital marketing agencies, due to the fact that many were trying to "exploit" data points to better target their ads. In the UK, which was recently elected as the European technology powerhouse, it has been pointed out how machine and deep learning have impacted agencies. In Manchester, eventually, Stephen McCance, operation director at Red Cow Media, have invested over £300.000 in data science-related strategies, leading, of course, to a far bigger awareness of the topic in Europe as a whole.

GDPR, IoT And ML: How Do They Work Together?

Once the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, the GDPRstrategy which was in place had to add specific sections which were related to this very matter. In fact, big data gathering isn't that simple in the IoT, nowadays, as the site/app/software must state properly whether data points are being collected or stored. Even if machine learning could avoid architectures that are limiting such data collection, GDPR has strictly limited access to R algorithms (the ones, to reference, which are processing those alphanumerical strings mentioned above) when it comes to data points and cookies.

To Conclude

The Cambridge Analytica will be remembered in the future as the biggest step towards proper regulation of big data and personal data in general. Data regulation and awareness have moved massively in the last couple of years, passing from being a completely neutral field to becoming part of our day to day talks and, most importantly, business strategies.

The emerging internet of things (IoT) is an extension of digital connectivity to devices and sensors in homes, businesses, vehicles and potentially almost anywhere. This innovation means that virtually any appropriately designed device can generate and transmit data about its operations, which can facilitate monitoring and a range of automatic functions. To do this IoT requires a set of event-centered information and analytic processes that enable people to use that event information to make optimal decisions and take act effectively.

To better understand how this technology is being deployed and used Ventana Research is launching benchmark research on The Internet of Things. The research will explore organizations’ experiences with IoT initiatives and with attempts to align IT projects, resources and spending with new business objectives that demand real-time intelligence and event-driven architectures.

In many industries, organizations can gain competitive advantage if they can reduce the elapsed time between an event occurring and being able to take action or make decisions in response to it. Existing business intelligence (BI) tools provide useful analysis of and reporting on data drawn from previously recorded transactions, but organizations now areconcluding that employees and processes in IT, business operations and front-line customer sales, service and support also need to be able to detect and respond to events as they happen.

Our previous Internet of Things benchmark research found that both business objectives and regulations are driving demand for new technology and practices. By using them many activities can be managed better, among them manufacturing, customer engagement processes, algorithmic trading, dynamic pricing, yield management, risk management, security, fraud detection, surveillance, supply chain and call center optimization, online commerce and gaming. Success in efforts to combat money laundering, terrorism or other criminal behavior also depends on reducing information latency through the application of new techniques.

As with any innovation, embracing IoT may require substantial changes to any organization. These are among the challenges business leaders face as they consider adopting this evolving technology:

• They find it difficult to evaluate the business value of enabling real-time sensing of data and event streams using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, agents and other systems embedded not only in physical locations like warehouses but also in business processes, networks, mobile devices, data appliances and other technologies.
• They lack an IT architecture that can support and integrate these systems as the volume and frequency of information increase.
• They are uncertain how to set reasonable business and IT expectations, priorities and implementation plans for important technologies that may conflict or overlap. These can include BI, event processing, business process management, rules management, network upgrades and new or modified applications and databases.
• They don’t understand how to create a personalized user experience that enables nontechnical employees in different roles to monitor data or event streams, identify significant changes, quickly understand the correlation between events, and determine the right decisions or actions to take.

This research will continue our investigation of how organizations are dealing with these challenges and increasing their responsiveness to events by rebalancing the roles of networks, applications and databases to reduce latency; it also will explore ways in which they are using sensor data and alerts to anticipate problematic events. We will benchmark the performance of organizations’ implementations, including IoT, event stream processing, event and activity monitoring, alerting, event modeling and workflow, and process and rules management.

Click here to participate in this research, and here to learn more about Ventana Research’s methodology and large body of business research. Ventana Research also has conducted research in related areas including Data Preparation, Machine Learning, Data and Analytics in the Cloud, Next-Generation Predictive Analytics and Big Data Analytics and Integration.

Regards,
David Menninger

Bad Cars: Anatomy of a Ransomware Attack

By Alan Grau, VP of IoT, Embedded Systems, Sectigo

TV and science fiction writers have let their imaginations run wild with theories about what could happen if your car was attacked by bad actors. There have been a few real-world cases where white-hat hackers and researchers have been able – in limited, controlled instances – to actually penetrate a car’s electronics and communications systems, take over the car’s steering and acceleration systems, and potentially do real damage.

However, there are other scenarios that might not be as obvious or as dramatic.

For example, what if your car’s computer was infected by a virus that greatly reduced the engine’s efficiency or capped the car’s maximum driving speed? What if the virus did something less dramatic, such as make the car unable to lock the controls for automatic window operation, or simply prevent the car from starting? No one would die, but the car owner would be very upset, posing a disaster for the automobile’s manufacturers.

Motor City Ransomware

Electric Vehicles require sophisticated control and safety technologies for their electrical power systems to safely manage the high voltages that store and distribute from their battery systems. If something goes wrong, the car cannot operate, people could get electrocuted, or the car could burst into flames or explode. These are real dangers that are managed by the car’s network of fuses, circuit breakers, and control systems.

What would happen if a cyber hacker got into these sensitive electronic systems and turned off the safety and control system?

Why would someone do this? Money, of course.

Suppose the bad guys successfully penetrated and infected these vehicles? Imagine now that they had the software or security keys that could fix these problems, but hold them as ransom, jeopardizing an automaker’s entire fleet of new cars.

How many millions (or tens of millions) of dollars would the automaker pay to get that solution? Holding a manufacturer hostage is a very real possibility, as evidenced by the results that today’s hackers are getting by attacking hospitals and cities and successfully extracting substantial ransoms to just return these institution’s data. In a recent WIRED article, The Biggest Cybersecurity Crisis of 2019 So Far, which discusses the risks to “things” and across supply chains, the FBI explained, "We are seeing an increase in targeted ransomware attacks. Cyber criminals are opportunistic. They will monetize any network to the fullest extent.”

Pre- and Post-Assembly Infections

It is possible that cars could be infected before they even hit the auto dealers’ lots. Bad actors have the capability to infect a small electronic part, essential to the auto manufacturing food chain, purchased from one of the hundreds of component suppliers.

How could auto manufacturers possibly test each electronic element? It is almost impossible - and requires that parts manufacturers themselves take more care in their software development process to ensure the software in these components are not infected during manufacturing process, or during the testing and shipping processes.

Of course, cyber infections could happen on the actual assembly line where the cars are put together. With many car manufacturing plants using IoT connected robots and machines, there is always a possibility of infection happening on the assembly line.

These components could even become infected after assembly, during the manufacturers’ testing and process. Infection, during installation, or with after-market parts and upgrades, could arise after the vehicles arrive at the dealers’ facilities.

Already aware of the possibility and the potential disastrous effects of infected cars reaching the market, manufacturers throughout the supply chain need to become more aware of how their devices could be attacked and infected even before they leave the warehouse. This means embedding IoT security from day one - from the smallest electronic components to final assembly of motors, transmissions and other large vehicle components.

About Sectigo

Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA) provides award-winning, purpose-built and automated PKI management solutions to secure websites, connected devices, applications, and digital identities. As the largest commercial Certificate Authority, trusted by enterprises globally for more than 20 years, and more than 100 million SSL certificates issued in over 200 countries, Sectigo has the proven performance and experience to meet the growing needs of securing today’s digital landscape. For more information, visit www.sectigo.com.

In spite of the fact that it has been with us in some structure and under various names for a long time, the Web of Things (IoT) is abruptly the thing. The capacity to interface, speak with, also, remotely deal with a limitless number of arranged, mechanized gadgets by means of the Web is getting to be inescapable, from the production line floor to the emergency clinic working space to the private cellar. The change from shut systems to big business IT systems to the open Internet is quickening at a disturbing pace—and legitimately raising cautions about security.

 As we become progressively dependent on insightful, interconnected gadgets in each part of our lives, how do we shield conceivably billions of them from interruptions and obstruction that could bargain individual security or undermine open wellbeing? 

As a worldwide innovator in inserted innovation arrangements, Wind River® has been profoundly included since its beginning in verifying gadgets that perform life-basic capacities and conform to stringent administrative necessities. This paper inspects the limitations and security difficulties presented by IoT associated gadgets, and the Wind Riverway to deal with tending to them.

The IoT development is driven by business needs as a feature of big business advanced change 

As indicated by Machina Research, the absolute number of IoT associations will develop from six billion of every 2015 to 27 billion by 2025. It implies a compound yearly development rate (CAGR) of 16%. As far as market development, the Berg Insight report predicts an expansion of the worldwide third-party  IoT platform from €610m in 2015 to €3.05bn in 2021.

IoT Security Risks and Challenges 

Three classes of IoT dangers include: 

1. Dangers that are common in any Internet framework 

2. Dangers that are explicit to IoT gadgets 

3. Wellbeing to guarantee no mischief is brought about by abusing actuators, for example. 

Conventional security practices, for example, securing open ports on gadgets have a place with the first class (for instance, an industrial refrigerator associated with the Internet so as to send alarms about the item stock and temperature may utilize an unbound SMTP server and can be undermined by a botnet).

The second class incorporates issues explicitly identified with IoT equipment, for example, the gadget may have its safe data traded off. For instance, some IoT gadgets are excessively little to bolster appropriate unbalanced encryption. Moreover, any gadget that can interface with the Internet has an inserted working framework sent in its firmware and a significant number of these installed working frameworks are not structured with security as their essential thought. 

Adaptability: Managing an enormous number of IoT hubs requires versatile security arrangements. 

Availability: In IoT interchanges, associating different gadgets of various capacities in a safe way is another test. 

End-to-end Security: End-to-end safety efforts between IoT gadgets and Internet has are similarly significant.

Validation and Trust: Proper ID and confirmation abilities and their arrangement inside a complex IoT condition are not yet adult.

This counteracts foundation of trust connections between IoT parts, which is essential for IoT applications requiring impromptu availability between IoT segments, for example, Smart City situations. Trust the board for IoT is expected to guarantee that information investigation motors are sustained with legitimate information Without validation it is beyond the realm of imagination to expect to guarantee that the information stream created by an element contains what it should contain. 

Personality Management: Identity the board is an issue as poor security practices are frequently executed. For instance, the utilization of clear content/Base64 encoded IDs/passwords with gadgets also, machine-to-machine (M2M) is a typical mix-up. 

This ought to be supplanted with oversaw tokens, for example, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) utilized by OAuth/OAuth2 confirmation and approval structure (the Open Authorization). 

Assault Resistant Security Solutions: Diversity in IoT gadgets results in a requirement for attack-resistant and lightweight security arrangements. As IoT gadgets have restricted process assets, they are helpless against asset enervation assaults.

Conclusion

IoT has already taken the market by storm. If you want to consider getting into the niche, IoT based mobile applications and devices are the best entry point for entrepreneurs. A reputed mobile application development company can help you develop a robust IoT based application.

Enterprises are increasingly complementing their cloud-based IoT solutions with edge computing to accelerate the pace of data analysis and make better decisions, faster.

Just a few years ago, many expected all the Internet of Things (IoT) to move to the cloud—and much of the consumer-connected IoT indeed lives there—but one of the key basics of designing and building enterprise-scale IoT solutions is to make a balanced use of edge and cloud computing. Most IoT solutions now require a mix of cloud and edge computing. Compared to cloud-only solutions, blended solutions that incorporate edge can alleviate latency, increase scalability, and enhance access to information so that better, faster decisions can be made, and enterprises can become more agile as a result.

That being said, complexity introduced by edge computing should justify the objectives at hand, which include scale, speed, and resiliency. A choice that goes too far in one direction typically introduces substantial operational complexities and expenses. Ultimately, the enterprise should take into consideration a full range of factors that reflect its own particular objectives in designing and building an IoT solution in the first place.

In this article, we discuss when and how enterprises can optimally make use of both the edge and the cloud in their IoT solutions. We explain the roles edge and cloud computing play, why the edge may be needed, and how to approach selecting a solution. We also explain some of the complexities with edge computing and provide some use cases.

The cloud explosion and the latency challenge: Enter edge computing

We have experienced a veritable explosion of cloud adoption in the past decade—the IT functionality of many modern companies exists exclusively, or in large part, in the cloud. Among the many benefits of the cloud infrastructure are cost effectiveness, scale, self-service automation, interoperability with traditional back-office systems, and centralized functionality.

At the same time, the amount of sensor-generated data has grown strongly too, and this trend is expected to continue in the years ahead. Because data can become essentially valueless after it is generated, often within milliseconds, the speed at which organizations can convert data into insight and then into action is generally considered mission critical. Therefore, having the smallest possible latency between data generation and the decision or action can be critical to preserve an organization’s agility. However, as the speed of data transmission is inviolably bounded by the speed of light, it is only by reducing the distance that data must travel that the latency challenge can be mitigated or avoided altogether. In a cloud-only world the data ends up traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles, so where latency is critical to a solution, edge computing can become key.

According to one estimate, as much as 55 percent of IoT data could soon be processed near the source, either on the device or through edge computing. Indeed, scale plays a big role in this likely shift—growing data demands will likely put the focus on latency, and decreased latency could dramatically improve the response time, thereby saving both time and money.

Continuing reading more by Deloitte's Ken Carroll and Mahesh Chandramouli here.

Now that the Internet of Things has become a social and technical phenom, it is time to check out some of the coming year trends for app developers and the Internet of Things.

Due to the massive amounts of data that is able to be moved through the Internet of Things airways, app developers will continue to develop apps that help as far as artificial intelligence and machine learning. It is not because of the massive amount of information and data that is sent through, rather because of the amount, app developers are working on applications that are able to make logical sense from the information and data.

Storing information and data in the cloud has become firsthand to people and businesses alike. Due to the high amount of bandwidth required to save information in the cloud, businesses are looking for ways to expand on the cloud. All have used private clouds, public clouds and even a private data center, however app developers are working on ways to combine all of those options. When looking for ways to streamline all the business needs, connected clouds are becoming more of a trend. App developers are designing more of a multi-cloud habitat for information and data.

There is a simulation tool that works alongside machine learning, or artificial intelligence. The DTT, Digital Twin Technology is known as a hybrid twin, is a virtual imitation of real products, processes, system or asset used for certain purposes.

Although cloud storage will remain popular in use, app developers are getting real close to edge architecture. This brings the centralized system and the cloud to a further expansive advantage. Not only cheaper but able to be more effective, edge architecture is able to store more data in a micro center.

This is the year of advancement for the 5G mobile devices and their improvements. Last year we witnessed 5G brought to life in applications. Now we see that the new 5G cellular networks will gain massive attention in the Internet of Things. Which will ultimately begin the change of the landscape for the IoT?

We are facing the age of Social acceptance or denial for the Internet of Things. The longer that the Internet of Things develops, the more we will find that some groups are questioning the social, ethical and legal issues. This is because the Internet of Things is very broad-based and capable of changing all business areas.

Infonomics is moving data ownership or monetization to brand new heights. All this data in the Internet of Things will become more of an asset.

The user experience of the Internet of Things is going to be led by factors such as new sensors, new experience edge architecture and context, and of course new and different algorithms. We will then need to adopt new ways without the use of screens or keyboards, and definitely no voice assistant.

There will also be a massive increase of the Smart Homes. App developers have increased the Smart apps that we use, and are developing apps that will make our homes interact with people. Imagine a world where the home is not only where the heart is, but also the home that directs it’s people on what to do.

This means it will not be too far off before app developers have found a way to make smart cities or smart towns. This possibility that the Internet of Things can mix with responsive cities to lighten the traffic congestion, improve the safety in its community and also look for ways to maintain sustainability.

It is also coming closer to the time when the Internet of Things combines with Artificial Intelligence and we produce the robotic assistants. They will help make all critical decisions that need to be made. This self-learning system will read all analytics and derive any important changes.

App developers already have created many apps for Artificial Intelligence. There is a little robot like ‘friends’ that will assist in teaching your children, they interact with the child and some can have little conversations with the child.

A huge improvement that will be soon possible with the help of app developers is what we can call predictive maintenance. This can prevent the labor costs associated with routine maintenance when it is not necessary. Predictive maintenance could be intelligent apps designed by app development companies to notify before maintenance is needed. This could be helpful in automation businesses as a warning before there is a big issue or major break in a piece of equipment. Maintenance will only be necessary when any change is noted in the process or working gears of the machines.

The benefits of predictive maintenance or predictive skills will help auto and health insurance industries to lessen risks or have payouts when the vehicle, home or health issue would have been maintained as needed.

It may not be too far into the future when we are living like George Jetson and his family did, in the days of our youth and on the television. Was that truly foresight, or just a dumb cartoon made up for kids to laugh at? All the technology that has developed to this point, and app developers continue to make our lives easier with smart apps, I do truly think we are very near George Jetson and his wife. Maybe we will be in flying cars real soon too? Dare we say that we do have skywalks, and some automated ones.

Drivers are the backbone of the trucking industry and driver retention is one of the biggest concerns. Are you facing issues like driver shortage or driver retention? Advanced technology offers various solutions to transportation industry for such issues. Real-time monitoring, time-saving in shifts, better communication of drivers with managers, etc. simplify the work of drivers. Job dissatisfaction and operational inefficiencies are the major reasons why drivers leave the job. But this can be reduced, let’s see how.

How to improve the job satisfaction of drivers?
Trucking industry relies on the drivers for navigating through complex routes to transport sensitive goods safely and on time. It is a hectic job already and hence it is necessary that the drivers are satisfied with their job. Or else they will leave the job which hampers the business profits. What efforts can be taken for retention of drivers?

Simplifying the Driver’s Work using Technology
Drivers are constantly on the road. Traffic, bad weather conditions, etc. can be very irritating to them. However, using GPS systems, such conditions can be tracked proactively. The drivers can be directed to other routes which are having less traffic or some shifts can be canceled if the routes show bad weathers ahead. The drivers will not be annoyed by waiting for long hours and instead can take rest if the shifts are canceled due to bad weathers.

Automation and digitalization save time and efforts of the drivers. There are mobile apps which keep track of the load on the trucks. It saves the drivers of manual checking of load and also sends messages to the owners about the load. Also, in case of any theft or adding illegal loads to the truck, the owners can get instant messages right on their smartphones.

One such eminent example is the mobile app- Appweigh. It uses Bluetooth-enabled weight sensor to keep the track of the load on your truck. It is a budget-friendly app which combines the sensor and Bluetooth technology. Throughout the shipment of the trucks, the sensors detect the pressure on the tyres and clearly display the weight through AppWeigh on the smartphone of owners or fleet managers. The drivers don’t need to keep manual watch on the weight when the load reaches a certain destination. It is automatically sent to the owners.

Using IoT in Transportation for Better Communication and Time Management
Open communication with the drivers not only ensures transparency but also makes the drivers feel like true partners in the business. It encourages and engages them. Internet of things or IoT in transportation industry is playing a crucial role in connecting technology with people for more accurate results. It connects tools like sensors, RFID systems, GPS systems, smartphones, etc. to each other to gather vital data and communicate it to drivers and owners. Using this data, they can make informed decisions for improving various processes in fleet management. With such transparency, manual errors by drivers can be avoided and small issues can be discussed proactively before they turn into bigger problems.

Technology saves the drivers from keeping manual records of loads, timings, etc. as everything is automatically recorded. It reduces the stress of the drivers and ensures loyalty to the owners.

Making the Driver Health a Priority
Drivers’ health is the most critical topic when it comes to driver retention. A trucking industry can offer health benefits like health insurance plans, nutrition programs, free health screenings, etc. to drivers. Such benefits are an investment in your drivers. Also, the incorporation of smart cameras can reduce the risks of accidents. When the drivers feel safe and cared for their lives, your company reputation improves. They themselves will ask other drivers to join your company.

Giving Performance Incentives and Engaging Drivers
When drivers are appreciated and rewarded for their good work, it inspires them to do better and also be stable with your trucking industry. Financial incentive systems can be used to reward the most productive and safest drivers. Technology can be used to evaluate the drivers’ performance fairly. Real-time coaching and user-friendly solutions to any issues will help the drivers to progress faster and feel supported. The drivers who work hard to improve their performance can be awarded with the performance incentives. This will also encourage and engage fellow drivers. 

Conclusion
Smart technologies are providing highly efficient solutions to transportation industry. Along with driver retention, these technologies help in real-time visibility of the processes, maintaining the vehicle health, improving warehouse and yard management, etc. which enormously boost the business profits. IoT in transportation industry provides robust security services to drivers as well as the freight. Reliable data that owners get from smart technical solutions lets them take the right decisions to maintain their workforce. It enhances driver satisfaction and retention rates.

The range and depth of applications dependent on IoT sensors continues to swell – from collecting real-time data on the floors of smart factories, to monitoring supply chains, to enabling smart cities, to tracking our health and wellness behaviors. The networks utilizing IoT sensors are capable of providing critical insights into the innerworkings of vast systems, empowering engineers to take better informed actions and ultimately introduce far greater efficiency, safety, and performance into these ecosystems. 

One outsized example of this: IoT sensors can support predictive maintenance by detecting data anomalies that deviate from baseline behavior and that suggest potential mechanical failures – thus enabling an IoT-fueled organization to repair or replace components before issues become serious or downtime occurs. Because IoT sensors provide such a tremendous amount of data pertaining to each particular piece of equipment when in good working condition, anomalies in that same data can clearly indicate issues.

Looking at this from a data science perspective, anomalies are rare events which cannot be classified using currently available data examples; anomalies can also come from cybersecurity threats, or fraudulent transactions. It is therefore vital to the integrity of IoT systems to have solutions in place for detecting these anomalies and taking preventative action. Anomaly detection systems require a technology stack that folds in solutions for machine learning, statistical analysis, algorithm optimization, and data-layer technologies that can ingest, process, analyze, disseminate, and store streaming data from myriad IoT sources.

But that said, actually creating an IoT anomaly detection system remains especially challenging given the large-scale nature inherent to IoT environments, where millions or even billions of data events occur daily. To be successful, the data-layer technologies supporting an IoT anomaly detection system must be capable of meeting the scalability, computational, and performance needs fundamental to a successful IoT deployment.

I don’t work for a company that sells anomaly detection, but I – along with colleagues on our engineering team – recently created an experimental anomaly detection solution to see if it could stand up to the specific needs of large-scale IoT environments using pure open source data-layer technologies (in their 100% open source form). The testing utilized Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra to produce an architecture capable of delivering the features required for IoT anomaly detection technology from the perspectives of scalability, performance, and realistic cost effectiveness. In addition to matching up against these attributes, Kafka and Cassandra are highly compatible and complementary technologies that lend themselves to being used in tandem. Not fully knowing what to expect, we went to work.

In our experiment, Kafka, Cassandra, and our anomaly detection application are combined in a Lambda architecture, with Kafka and our streaming data pipeline serving as the speed layer, and Cassandra acting as the batch and serving layer. (See full details on GitHub, here.) Kafka enables rapid and scalable ingestion of streaming data, while leveraging a “store and forward” technique that acts as a buffer for ensuring that Cassandra is not overwhelmed when data surges spike. At the same time, Cassandra provides a linearly scalable, write-optimized database well-suited to storing the high-velocity streaming data produced by IoT environments. The experiment also leveraged Kubernetes on AWS EKS, to provide automation for the experimental application’s provisioning, deployment, and scaling. 

We progressed through the development of our anomaly detection application test using an incremental approach, continually optimizing capabilities, monitoring, debugging, refining, and so on. Then we tested scale: 19 billion real-time events per day were processed, enough to satisfy the requirements of most any IoT use case out there. Achieving this result meant scaling out the application from three to 48 Cassandra nodes, while utilizing 574 CPU cores across Cassandra, Kafka, and Kubernetes clusters. It also included maintaining a peak 2.3 million writes per second into Kafka, for a sustainable 220,000 anomaly checks per second.

In completing this experiment, we’ve demonstrated a method that IoT-centric organizations can use for themselves in building a highly scalable, performant, and affordable anomaly detection application for IoT use cases, fueled by leveraging the unique advantages offered by pure open source Apache Kafka and Cassandra at the all-important data layer.

Considering that the IoT is in its infancy and due to the last years wasted in predictions that have not been fulfilled, in disappointing statistics of successful projects and with most companies without clear strategies, it is normal to think that R & D is today so necessary for boost and accelerate this increasingly sceptical market.

R&D should be an essential part of bringing innovation to any company via IoT projects. And though we can all agree how important R&D is, it requires a great deal of experience, senior experts, and specific toolsets—resources that not every company can say they have handy.

However, there is a risk when deriving the strategic decisions that the executive directors consider to be technological towards the R & D departments. Many times, oblivious to the reality of the markets, those responsible for R & D with the invaluable aid of the subsidies of the different Administrations, they launch to develop products and technologies for problems that do not exist, just for the fact of obtaining recognition or to continue living without pressures of the Top Management. I am enemy of granted subsidies granted most of the time by unqualified Administration organisms that does not understand that need to prevail the utility, the business model, the business case and the commercialization over the innovation that R & D said to be developed.

Now, if we ask the sellers of IoT technology, products and services, they may not be so happy with the idea of having to talk with the R & D areas instead of with other areas of the company more likely to buy. Most time, R &D departments decide to do it themselves. Vendors know, that with great probability, they will not to close deals due to lack of budget of the R &D or the low visibility of this area by the rest of the departments of the company.

The Importance of R&D for the Internet of Things

Innovation in IoT is a major competitive differentiator. See below some advices to have a decisive advantage over competitors:

• IoT-focused companies need to invest in R&D to keep up with the rapidly changing and expanding market. It is important that an organization’s R&D iteration turn times are quick, otherwise the company is not going to be able to keep pace with the expected IoT market growth. However, it’s not enough to simply speed up R&D—innovative IoT firms, both start-ups and established companies, must also make sure their R&D processes are extremely reliable.
• You can’t solve R&D speed issues just by increasing budget.
• Executives must maintain strong, steady communication with R&D regarding the department’s priorities over a particular time frame and how progress will be measured.
• Guidelines are invaluable: The more structured and streamlined R&D procedures are, the better IoT companies will be able to move from conception to delivery.
• Design innovative IoT products but accelerate time to market.
• Internal collaboration: R&D team should share real-time data across internal departments to spur intelligent product design
• External collaboration: Connect with customers and partners to ensure success
• Differentiation: Drive overall business value with IoT.

Outsource or not Outsource R & D for your IoT project

Just like any other technology, IoT products and solutions require thorough research and development, and it better be done by professionals. Despite the noise generated by analysts and companies around the IoT, the reality is that there have not been many IoT projects and therefore it is not easy to find good professionals with proven experience in IoT to hire.

When I think of Outsourcing IoT projects, Eastern European and Indian companies immediately come to my mind. No doubt because the R & D talent seems to be cheaper there. Spain could also be a country to outsource IoT, but at the moment I do not see it.

The benefits of Outsourcing R&D for IoT Projects:

• Expertise and an Eye for Innovation
• Bring an IoT Project to Market Faster
• Optimize Your Costs
• Control and Manage Risks

I am not sure about the quality of most of these companies or the experience of their teams in the development of IoT products or in the implementation of IoT projects, but there is no doubt that there are benefits to Outsource R & D for some IoT Projects. You should select any of these companies after a careful evaluation.

Recommendation: Do not stop your IoT projects if you do not have the skills and professionals in house. Luckily, there are companies who offer outsourcing R&D for IoT projects.

Note: Remember I can help you to identify and qualify the most suitable Outsource R&D for your IoT project.

Spain is not different in R & D for IoT

I have not believed in R & D in Spain for years. There are exceptions without a doubt, but it seems evident that the prosperity and welfare of Spain is not due to our R & D. Fortunately we have sun and beach and a lot of brick to put in houses that are not sold because of high prices and low wages.

With the entry into the EU, I thought that we had great markets open to us. I was also optimistic that we would have great opportunities in the Latin American market, thanks to the fact that our research and development capacity would have been consolidated effectively in our companies and universities because it would be profitable and worldwide recognized.

But it has not been that way. The technology developed in Spain and more specifically that relating to the IoT has little chance of being commercialized in France, Germany and not to mention in the UK. If we add the development gap of the countries of South America and that our local market is averse to technological risk, it is difficult to flourish R & D in IoT or Industry 4.0 here in our lovely Spain.

That does not mean that we do not have public R & D budgets for these areas. What happens is that the same thing that happened during the last 30 years has happened. The incentives and aids are few and for the most part used to finance large companies with little return to society. There is no rigorous control of the aid granted and, above all, there is no plan to encourage the local and global marketing of the products developed with the talent of our scientists and researchers.

I have stopped believing and trusting in our successive Governments for the change in R & D but there are exceptions that are worthwhile to follow and work with them. For this reason, I continue help them demonstrate that “SPAIN CAN BE DIFFERENT”.

Key Takeaway

After years of unfulfilled expectations, companies are sceptical of the potential growth of the IoT market or the benefits in their business. R&D department can be a cure to boost IoT initiatives but also a poison to kill IoT initiatives.

IoT may have started in R&D, but their benefits don’t have to end there. To drive overall business value, it’s important to share IoT data – both internally and externally. Facilitating open collaboration, discovering new ways to innovate products, and accelerating time to market, you can differentiate R&D and your business.

As fast turn times and reliability becomes a focal part of companies’ R&D processes, these companies will be well-positioned to thrive within the IoT market.

Thanks for your Likes and Comments

Elements of IoT are being shared with secondary students in classrooms all around the world.  My contribution to this educational arena has been toward the design and implementation of IoT curriculum.  My first attempt at such a curriculum was in partnership with a technology camp company called Young Hacks Academy for which I designed their IoT curriculum.  You can see a presentation of the core curriculum here.

I recently revisted the YHA IoT curriculum I developed and am ready for a complete rewrite.  I encourage potential collaborators in the IoT space to reach out to me if interested.  My first effort towards rewriting some of my IoT curriculum is to integrate my CS1 Game Engine, for multiplayer progressive web applications, with IoT components.  At this point I have only written a very basic example which can be seen in the tech demo for the CS1 Game Engine.  I have made a Glitch project for the CS1 Game Engine here.  You can log into the CS1 Game Engine tech demo with username computer or science, both with password 1234.

Please reach out to me if you are interested in raising the bar for IoT in secondary education.

Sincerely,

Eric Eisaman

LinkedIn

There is no doubt about the capability of IoT the way it is spearheading in the smart technology market by providing innovative solutions to various industries.

Advanced industries, smart vehicles, smarter cities, smart home and more have already under the influence of the IoT touch. However, IoT in farming is the new trend that has geared up for a while. And why not?

Do you know the global population is growing at a rapid speed. It is about to touch 9.6 billion by 2050. And to feed this much of the population there has to be an innovative way to compensate this need. IoT comes as a silver bullet solution for it.

The way IoT is helping out farmers and farm owners is commanding. The upcoming years are expecting more inventions in farming by different IoT applications.

This article explains the different ways of smart farming and effective applications of IoT in smart farming.

Precision Farming

To make the Farming practice more productive and accurate precision agriculture (also known as precision farming) is used.

Basically, this is done through installing or using some sensors, smart devices, robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, and so on. By doing so farming can be made so systematic and well maintained thereby raising livestock and growing crops in a smart way.

The adoption of access to high-speed internet, low-cost satellites, mobile devices by the manufactures are few mostly used agriculture IoT technologies.

Numerous organizations are leveraging this technology on ultramodern agronomic solutions due to the popularity of precision agriculture.

The soil moisture probe technology is an amazing example of IoT in smart farming. It provides complete in-season local agronomy support, and recommendation to optimize water use efficiency.

Drones for Agriculture

Technology in farming is changing for a good and what better example would it be than Agriculture Drones. Today, agriculture is the leading industry to integrate drones for better results.

Agricultural drones are best to monitor crop, crop health assessment, irrigation, crop spraying, planting , and soil and field analysis.

The prime benefits of using drones in agriculture are health imaging, GIS mapping, saves time, increase crop yields.

Precision Hawk is a company that uses drones for collecting valuable information via a series of sensors. Mostly these sensors are used for imaging, mapping, and surveying of agricultural land.

Drones are used to do in-flight monitoring and observations. The farmers can easily access by entering details of the field they want to survey and select the altitude or ground resolutions.

From the information of the drone, we can draw insights regarding the plant’s health indices, plan counting and yield prediction, and plant measurement. We pressure mapping, drainage mapping, nitrogen content, scouting report and so on.

Livestock Monitoring

Wireless IoT applications are used by the large farm owners to gather the data regarding the location, well-being, and health of their cattle.
This data helps them in identifying sick animals to separate them from the herd thereby preventing the spread of disease. It also lowers the cost off labors as it locates their cattle with the IoT based sensors.

There is a company called JMB North America which offers cow monitoring solution to cattle producers. One solutions let owners of the production company to monitor if the cow is pregnant or not.

Smart Greenhouse

Greenhouse farming is a method which helps in enhancing the yield of fruits, veggies, and crops. Greenhouses control regulate the environmental parameters through manual intervention results in production loss, energy loss, and labor cost. These methods are less effective.

With IoT, you can build a smart greenhouse which will monitor as well as controls the climate reducing the need for manual intervention.

Different sensors that measure environmental parameters according to plant are used for controlling the environment in the smart greenhouse. Additionally, we can create a cloud server for remote access when it is connected using IoT.

The sensors used in IoT provide data on the light levels, pressure, humidity, and temperature. It can control the actuators to open a window, turn on/off lights, controlling a heater, all connected through a Wifi signal. 

Conclusion

Farmers and rancher are relieved to have an IoT agricultural application making it possible to-gather meaning full information. Large landowners should understand the potential of the IoT market for agricultural.

If you are willing to integrate IoT in smart farming, you should approach for Leading IoT App Development Company and leverage the benefits of IoT.

Picture Courtesy: Pixabay

Recently I have attended an IoT conference where three presentations caught my attention:

Presentation 1: Development of IoT. This presentation was held by an IoT expert representing a renowned IT company. He proudly spoke about pioneering IoT projects his company is working on:

(1) A smart house, equipped with sensors from sofa to the main gate, with a notification feature in case of any abnormal activities.

(2) A robot arm which performs a quality assurance test by detecting flaws in a manufactured part and communicating the error via sound or speech. The message delivered: These robots are being taught, by means of AI, to take over the human work. The presentation of these projects elicited a big round of applause as the audience just witnessed the future development of the digitally empowered products and AI. The whole enthusiasm turned into confusion as the second speaker came up with his presentation.

Presentation 2: Disruption of IoT. This presentation was held by a cybersecurity startup company, founded by a couple of ethical hackers, which highlighted the risks of minor security loopholes in almost all IoT applications. The speaker ended most of his statements with “this can ruin the end user or even lead to fatal consequences”. Examples he provided included hacking and manipulating a pace-maker, remote hijacking a plane, manipulating a smart house to cause a false alarm or open the doors, hacking the industrial IoT to manipulate the processes, copying bitcoins and so on.  For those who think that brownfield manufacturing is still an unknown world for hackers: The last 5 minutes of his time, he utilized hacking live into a legacy SCADA system. What the gentleman also stated is that the hackers are always a step ahead of what society thinks the latest development in the field of cybersecurity and that the hackers view each and every sensor as a potential “doorway” to the system sitting behind it.  His presentation left us all questioning the digitalization trend (or opening more doors to the hackers) and associated risks.

Presentation 3: Disruption by IoT. The speaker from a renowned MNC highlighted the upcoming manpower crisis. The creation and operation of IoT applications oftentimes demand a different set of skills. Companies are investing heavily in IoT projects and they are either hiring IT experts or outsourcing the complete development.  This comes at the cost of shutting down entire business units and laying off hundreds of employees. Big organizations term it as restructuring. But the story does not end here. Once the smart machines take over more human jobs, then there will be an era of huge job scarcity. What will the society do with workers (let’s say all with an average age of 50), whose work has been taken over by the sophisticated robots?

I guess I do not have to tell you how these three cases are interlinked. These three presentations gave the audience a good food for thought as everyone was talking about them in one or the other context. The discussion however revolved around one question which I would like to ask here as well:

How much of IoT is too much?

Heavy equipment is mainly used extensively in industries such as construction, oil and gas, mining, forestry, energy, civil engineering, military engineering, transportation, and many others. Industrial heavy machines include construction equipment, wheel loaders, oilfield pieces, manufacturing equipment, earthmovers, hydraulic cranes, bulldozers, oversized trucks, forklifts, and more. Organizations rely on heavy machinery to speed up production and to avoid human errors or health risks.

With developments in IoT, it is possible to decrease equipment downtime while improving the efficiency of the output. Companies that supply industrial machinery and components are seeing strong interest in connected machinery and components which providing many IoT consulting Companies. IoT-powered asset management solutions offer a host of benefits, including predictive maintenance to prevent equipment failure, increased asset reliability, improved asset health, accident avoidance in the workplace, and downtime reduction.

Smart Asset Monitoring with IoT

Safety of personnel and assets, theft or pilferage of assets, accidents and resulting injuries, and bottlenecks in the supply chain are some of the common challenges that are prevalent in asset-intensive industries like manufacturing, utilities, construction. By improving visibility into day-to-day operations, replacing legacy systems with an integrated solution and automating manual processes, many of these challenges can be overcome. 

Digitalization, combining connected devices with IoT-based solutions, can help to overcome these issues. End-to-end clarity on the status of the equipment enables improved decision-making, increases asset reliability, and also improves the people and process efficiency. With the advances in technology, mature organizations have heavy machinery that is computerized, automated and enabled with connectivity and big data analytics, which increases the efficiency of the overall product development process.

Use cases: IoT in heavy machinery management

Let’s take a look at some of the use cases where IoT is transforming the way heavy equipment and related assets are managed.

Smart heavy equipment in warehouse management

Material handling equipment like trucks, forklifts, pallet trucks, and pump trucks are very important for any warehouse to perform daily activities such as loading, unloading, transporting goods to different areas, and picking goods from risky areas. Needless to say, these machines and their operators need to be managed properly to minimize the chances of accidents. Warehouse operators need to take preventive measures for vehicle accidents and injuries that occur while from shifting material, and take proper care while handling hazardous materials.

Today, futuristic warehouses are using driverless robotic equipment to assist in picking and moving operations. Guidance systems like global positioning system (GPS), lasers, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) are used in such warehouses and equipment.

For example, advanced driverless pallet trucks and forklifts are equipped with audible warnings and lights and have built-in sensors to detect obstructions. These sensors come with lasers or camera systems, which are positioned to detect objects and activity from the floor and are able to determine the height and distance around all sides of vehicles and warehouse corners. This makes the equipment intelligent – it knows when to slow down and stop to avoid a collision.

With the recent advances in IoT for warehouse equipment, the market has a new breed of smart forklifts that come equipped with 360-degree detection forklift antenna, which is able to detect when the workers come into forklift zone. When a worker is detected within the predefined danger zone, audio and visual alarms are set off inside the forklift cab to alert the driver. This helps to reduce the risk of injuries and property damage.

Smart heavy equipment in the construction sector

According to a MarketandMarkets report, the heavy construction equipment market size is estimated to grow from USD 121.46 Billion in 2015 to USD 180.66 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 7.0%. Depending on the construction application, heavy machines are mainly categorized into four types:

• Earth moving equipment
• Construction vehicles
• Material handling equipment
• Construction equipment

Wireless technology has a huge impact on the construction industry to provide connectivity for heavy equipment. These machines use technology-enabled devices combined with cloud computing, allowing storage and sharing of data.

IoT is playing a key role in boosting productivity, improving preventive maintenance, minimizing downtime, and reducing repair costs. Sensors integrated with the equipment are able to detect and send automated alerts related to the status of the equipment systems and parts. They can also compile and analyze usage and maintenance data, helping with preventive and predictive maintenance.

One of the major problems in the construction industry are injuries caused due to accidents involving people and heavy equipment. As the number of heavy equipment continues to rise, the risk also increases. IoT can help to make the equipment smarter and safer.

Additionally, IoT can help to track assets as they move around the site, or to a different site, ensuring that the assets are never stolen or lost – an ongoing issue on large construction sites that causes delays and decreases productivity.

Smart heavy equipment in transport and logistics

Transportation and logistics businesses want to optimize the supply chain. Many transportation companies are already using mobile devices, such as barcode scanners, mobile computing devices, and radio frequency identification (RFID) to solve challenges related to the supply chain. With RFID, many companies are achieving a high level of shipping and receiving accuracy, inventory accuracy, and faster order processing, along with a reduction in labor costs.

However,  due to drivers’ careless behavior, while driving heavy trucks or conveyors, company owners have to shell out a big amount for accident-related injuries, material loss or shipping delays. By using advanced technology that is capable of monitoring driver’s behavior and delivering alerts in case of possible collisions, the risk of these issues can be minimized.

Computer vision-based techniques and ADAS solutions, with a number of onboard sensors, can help with lane detection, traffic signal detection, driver behavior detection, GPS tracking, fuel management, report generation, notification alert, and predictive maintenance.

Using such solutions, the driver receives support to detect and avoid accidents. It is also possible to monitor a driver operating a heavy machine and automatic alerts can be generated if the driver is sleepy or inactive for a long duration.

Another effective solution for tracking of heavy machines/vehicles is based on installing GPS fleet tracking devices on the vehicles to gain real-time data updates. This is an efficient and secure solution that helps to resolve issues related to operational inefficiencies, theft, and fleet maintenance, increasing the overall productivity of the machines and vehicles.