2017 will be the year of IoT, according to analysts

Industrial and consumer IoT will take off in 2017 as chipmakers work to embed sensors in their products, according to new research.

It will take 12 to 18 months for the chips to land on the market and, when this happens, it will generate a surge in consumer interest for IoT products, Morgan Stanley predicts.

“We see an inflection point for IoT,” Morgan Stanley’s global semiconductor research team wrote in a note to clients. “With any new technology, the hype phase typically leads the fundamental impact by several years, and IoT has been no different.”

Competition will also intensify as more manufacturers and designers create chipsets tailored for the IoT market.

Yet data security remains a top concern as manufacturers worry about the industrial IoT”s potential vulnerabilities, according to the Morgan Stanley 2016 Automation World survey.

And there”s reason to panic, especially when it comes to consumer products. A popular electrical socket is vulnerable to malicious firmware upgrades and can be controlled remotely to expose users to both physical and online security risks, Bitdefender IoT researchers found.

By injecting malicious commands into the weak password of the device, an attacker can gain remote control of the device to re-schedule it, or access all the information the device uses, including the user”s email address and password, if the email notification feature is enabled.

This type of attack enables a malicious party to leverage the vulnerability from anywhere in the world,” says Alexandru Balan, Chief Security Researcher at Bitdefender. “Until now most IoT vulnerabilities could be exploited only near the smart home they were serving. This flaw allows hackers to control devices over the Internet and bypass the limitations of the network address translation. This is a serious vulnerability, and we could see botnets made up of these power outlets.”