SOC it to You!

Imagine a small chip with an oddly configured pin out footprint, originally designed to connect serial to USB. Now tweak the ROM on that chip, infuse it with a dash of RAM and a sprinkle of flash memory, and you have just actuated SOC, or system on a chip. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. You can buy the chips for about $5 and use them to connect devices to the old interwebs. That’s right. A $5 chip is now a gateway to the holy grail of network security.

Peter Boyle Unplugged

Now imagine Gene Wilder writing malicious code, standing over a laptop in a dark coffee shop corner shrieking “It’s Alive!” A recent HP Fortify study described IoT as the Frankenbeast of IT Security, a fairly apt analysis when you consider the evolution of IT that is now merging network, application, mobile, and cloud components together. The gatekeepers, it seems, have dissolved, and developers and hackers share a horse in the wild, wild west of technology. We never really secure one platform completely before another emerges. And this latest trend is still a Young Frankenbeast, as new applications and devices wade into the IoT water every day.

Firewall the Toaster

If you don’t think you’re ready to understand the scope of the Internet of Things, you are not alone. A recent Politico Special Report suggests that Washington doesn’t quite know what to do with it yet either. In the meantime, toasters gather data, fridges send push notifications, and wristwatches drive us into cyborg mode. And every member of your staff, every vendor and every customer, connect more of their lives and deliver more of their data into the ether. Now is not the time to get comfortably numb.

Call ICS today. We can help you make sense of things. Even the Internet of Things.