IoT Backbone is Riddled with Security Issues

Two popular IoT communications protocols are riddled with vulnerabilities and systemic issues which are exposing countless global organizations to industrial espionage, targeted attacks and DoS, according to Trend Micro. The security giant’s latest report, The Fragility of Industrial IoT’s Data Backbone, focuses on two of the most popular machine-to-machine protocols in use today: Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). As security is not built-in to these protocols by default, they exposed 219 million messages globally in just the four months of the research period. The report detailed how these security deficiencies leak credentials, sensitive information, and industry-related process data — which could be used to enable reconnaissance and industrial espionage.