It has been reported that the Japanese government has passed a new law amendment that will allow officials to hack into citizen’s Internet of Things devices to compile a list of devices that are prone to hacking.
Japanese government plans to hack into citizens' #IoT devices
The Japanese government approved a law amendment on Friday that will allow government workers to hack into people's In ..https://t.co/qKLkLabqyH pic.twitter.com/xVpjMZglVC— Yves Mulkers (@YvesMulkers) January 28, 2019
Gavin Millard, VP of intelligence at Tenable:
“Rather than hacking back, it appears the NICT are going to notify users of exposed devices with simple passwords. A quick Shodan search only finds roughly 1000 devices currently connected in Japan with easily guessed passwords though, so unless they are going to go deeper leveraging a scanning tool like Nessus, it’ll be more PR than actual security improvements.
“Poor IoT security has lead to major disruptive events occurring over the last few years, Murai being one of the notable ones, so raising awareness at a broad Countrywide level could lead to a few less poorly configured devices being connected
“We’ve seen the market flooded with connected devices – practically everything has had an upgrade and is now ‘smarter’ with IDC predicting that worldwide spend on IoT is expected to reach $1.2trillion in 2022. Ericsson has forecast that cellular IoT connections will reach 3.5billion in 2023. The Japan initiative is a start but globally users need to be educated that, at the point of plug-in, to change default passwords.”
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