Did you know the number of IoT devices is expected to increase by 75.44 billion by 2025?

Over the years, there’s been a rapid surge of IoT devices in the market, since more users are now opting for connected gadgets and appliances. To meet the increased demand of users, manufacturers are rushing their devices out of the warehouses without properly QAing potential security loopholes.

Such a lack of security measures is one of the key reasons why IoT-related cyberattacks have surged in the last few years.

Cybersecurity firm SonicWall stated in its “2019 Cyber Threat Report” that IoT attacks have grown by 217.5% between 2017 and 2018.

The state of IoT cybersecurity SonicWall’s SonicWall Capture Lab research team published some key cyberthreat findings in its 2019 report, discussing pertinent topics such as machine learning and how it can mitigate new malware attacks, encryption implementation, cryptojacking and phishing attacks, to name a few. IoT was also among the many topics discussed. The report gave updated insights into IoT security threats, which according to the firm augmented by 217.5% and made 32.7 million recorded events in 2018. Researchers also observed that IoT security breaches are mostly carried out through customized botnets. It is because of these malicious botnets that attackers are able to conduct low- to high-bandwidth distributed denial-of-service attacks, data theft and more. Moreover, the U.S. is among the top countries where most botnet attacks are carried out. According to the report, 46% of the botnets originated from the U.S., 13% from China, 7% from Russia, 7% from Brazil and so on. One of the key aspects that makes IoT attacks so appalling is that cybercriminals have now more points of entries. Take, for instance, the St. Jude Medical’s cardiac device vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain access to the device and tweak with pacing or shocks. Similarly, baby monitors are not completely secure against IoT threats prevalent today. One notorious IoT attack related to baby cams and monitors was the Owlet Wi-Fi baby monitor vulnerability. Perhaps the biggest IoT attack carried out by hackers was the Mirai botnet, which ended up affecting a huge portion of the internet. In fact, top web services, including CNN, Netflix, Reddit and Twitter, were affected by the botnet attack.