Are you ready to embrace and welcome the upcoming inter-connectivity of 1.8 billion devices by 2020 (1)? What -wait a moment, what are you talking about? I’m talking about your car, your home appliances and other M2M (machine to machine wireless and wired communications) aftermarket devices connected to the Internet. That’s all….. oh brother! It really doesn't give me a real fuzzy warm security and privacy feeling that my Car is out on the Net –right? Even when virtually all people are socially connected, and seen misuses over their own data looking the other way. Let us see if they still look away when their behavioral consumer profile is being sold without notice or their voice. On the other hand, I see a marketable consumer need such as being informed of a car maintenance status, or a home appliance inventory is running low. Even in emergency cases (crash notification, theft assistance) plus the convenient functions found on Chevrolet OnStar and Ford’s Sync Telematics systems such as remote car lock-open. A simple click of a button from your smart application, you could command your car doors; all within your own virtual private setting. That’s what the M2M companies want you to believe, what they don’t tell you is how they connect (secure or not), what they going to do with all the data points (behavioral consumer profile) and certainly not the high thread of hackers out on the Internet (inject a remote honk command into your car's –just to scare you for fun) and insecure application coding practices. As shown at the DefCon 21 (2) convention, a simple injection of specific commands can change the speed dial, your gas gauge, or simply induce breaking -by a simple switch command, all controlled by a hacker over the Internet or malicious code. Are you – are we really ready to operate a networked car? Which could be hacked and operated from across the oceans or around the corner? Give it a thought; think how connected we really should be and post your comments? * As always all opinions are my own. (1) Telefonica M2M 2013 Report (Telefonica Digital_Connected_Car2013_Full_Report_English.pdf) (2) Car hacking code released at Defcon 21 by Seth Rosenblatt August 2, 2013, 5:30 PM PDT on CNET.com
M2M the upcoming new Cyber War Frontier!