As tech companies converge today in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to unveil hundreds of innovative products that promise to change our daily lives, few of them tout security as a key component or feature. Ultimately it is the consumer that ends up paying the price for this detrimental oversight.
Last October’s distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against Dyn, Inc. – the internet’s equivalent of a phone book — was the result of the largest number of hijacked connected internet devices on record and crippled hugely popular sites like Amazon, Twitter and Spotify. While devastating to companies and consumers, the attack via connected devices undoubtedly served as a much-needed wakeup call to many in the tech industry who have rushed to develop and deploy new Internet of Things connected devices without an appropriate nod to security. That is precisely why we’re running the second-ever CES CyberSecurity Forum at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), providing the only cybersecurity-focused event at the world’s biggest consumer device conference.