For industrial applications, the Internet of Things risks becoming the Internet of Thieves. Perhaps industries making use of connected solutions should take a leaf out the Apple book and lock down their infrastructure.

What the ethical hackers say

As digital processes become deeply embedded across every industry, it makes sense that industrial control systems were tested at this year’s Pwn2Own contest. Hackers were asked to seek out vulnerabilities in industrial software and systems.

Contest winners Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade found that once they managed to break into the IT networks used at these companies, it was “relatively easy” to then cause havoc with systems and equipment.

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VPN provider Surfshark became the latest company to pull its servers from India this week, in response to government attempts to regulate encrypted web traffic.

The new directive by India’s top cybersecurity agency, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In), requires VPN, Virtual Private Server (VPS) and cloud service providers to store customers’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, know-your-customer records, and financial transactions for a period of five years.

SurfShark announced on Wednesday in a post titled “Surfshark shuts down servers in India in response to data law,” that it “proudly operates under a strict “no logs” policy, so such new requirements go against the core ethos of the company.”

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Apple took several steps toward a password-free future at its Worldwide Developer Conference, but another component of its strategy will be to replace CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) with a more private solution.

Introducing: Private Access Tokens

Apple is working with Cloudflare (with whom most think it developed the tech behind iCloud Private Relay). It is also working with Google and Fastly to deploy a standardized alternative to CAPTCHA called Private Access Tokens.

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A Cloudflare outage on Tuesday knocked hundreds of websites and services, including Discord, Shopify, Fitbit, Peleton, various cryptocurrency services, and Cloudflare itself, offline for a number of hours.

Founded in 2010, Cloudflare is a US-based content delivery network (CDN) that also provides distributed denial-of-service protection to online domains, speed optimization, and various cybersecurity services.

The company faced similar issues last week when an outage in the India region caused several services including Discord, Shopify, Canva and GitLab to suffer from network performance issues across India, Indonesia and Eastern Europe.

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In ancient times (before COVID-19) I grandly announced that the long-feared “splinternet” had arrived. And I made peace with the fact.

The splinternet idea is simple: instead of the single, global, open internet that early network pioneers intended, we actually now have multiple unconnected internets.

Exhibit A in my argument was the successful isolation of China by the Chinese government’s so called “Great Firewall of China,” along with aggressive internet censorship. The Chinese government not only censors domestically, but also takes advantage of the lack of controls abroad to censor globally, and to spread pro-Beijing propaganda and disinformation. For example, during the Bejing Olympics, thousands of super active fake accounts and bots flooded the comments of any prominent Twitter user (including myself) criticizing the Olympics or the Chinese government’s human rights record. Twitter later deleted the accounts.

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The chair of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants redefine “broadband” Internet as being capable of at least 100 megabits per second (or Mbps) download and 20Mbps upload speeds.

A change in the current, seven-year-old standard for broadband would almost certainly spur networking companies to upgrade equipment to meet the new benchmark. And it would increase data download and upload capacities across the internet — a key upgrade for remote and hybrid workers, the ranks of which swelled dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, broadband is defined as networks offering a minimum of 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds.

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