Computer Security Day - How to Secure Your Devices

RE: Computer Security Day - How to Secure Your Devices

jgerred — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:55:07 GMT

Security is a trade off between being secure and being usable. If you buy a new computer, take it home, dig a hole 60 feet deep, put the new computer (still in the box) in the bottom of the hole, and then fill the hole with concrete, you have a reasonable assurance that the computer is "secure", however it is not very usable.

With regards to the IoT ongoing issues, security should be thought of from the start. If you are building a device that is going to be directly connected to the internet then you should make sure that there is a way of securing it while still making it usable and keeping in mind that what is secure today might not be tomorrow.

My rule (not iron clad!) for devices I build and fiddle with is that they are not directly connected to the internet and require a gateway of some sort to get to them. This minimizes the exposure since you only secure one device and make that as secure as possible (again, keeping in mind that there are risks of having it connected to the net). Additionally, any device that I am fiddling with usually has a hard wired connection of some sort so it has less of a footprint open for attack vectors.

RE: Computer Security Day - How to Secure Your Devices

password8 — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 02:10:40 GMT

what I did to protect my computer was I bought a fire wall from one of my friends no one has hacked in to me since.

RE: Computer Security Day - How to Secure Your Devices

DAB — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 19:12:13 GMT

All of my devices are reasonably secure because I always turn them off when I am done.

It is difficult to hack a device that is physically not available for exploitation.

DAB

RE: Computer Security Day - How to Secure Your Devices

Jan Cumps — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 18:16:29 GMT

My wish is that each IoT Hardware & Software supplier incorporates security in their "Out of Box" example.

No more "Hello, world!" examples that are unsafe!

That's the first step to get designers booted up with a safe example, and forces the IoT world to treat safety as a start-up friendly commodity.

You can't blame starters to mess up when the experts give them unsafe starting points.