We are living in a technological world where everything is governed and controlled by a centralized system, whether it’s a bank account or the lighting system of your house, everything is digitized. This is how our life has transformed and how technology has changed everything. Well, it’s not just the rosy picture that we have, although, it has helped us simplify our life but it has also alleviated the vulnerabilities of being hacked.
When we are operating in the virtual world, there is a probability of your information and data being exposed to a third party. The hackers sitting out there may harp upon this vulnerability and might take control over your device or system and hence, there is a need to keep a check on it and make it more secure.
Here we will be discussing the Embedded system hacking; today embedded systems form the key part of our life, whether it’s our working environment or life at home, embedded device can be found everywhere.
What is Embedded System Hacking?
Embedded System hacking is the manipulating with the embedded software by breaching the security and trying to take control of the system.
There is a number of reasons why hackers hack the embedded system, one of them being spying on the devices, take control of the system and breach the security or just to extract the data. Today embedded system exist in most of the automated systems like IP cameras, pacemakers, blood pressure machine, infotainment system of the car, security devices, wireless access points etc.
How do the hackers do it?
Some of the embedded product development company have been designed the embededed products in a way that it makes easy for the hackers to enter the system by breaching the security and get away with the information and important data.
Well, hackers tap the lacunas or loopholes in your current embedded product design system and harp on these vulnerabilities, they hack on the flashable ROM chips or the firmware.
The embedded system may be under assault by myriads of hackers who will be using variegated hacking techniques to infiltrate your system and steal important data. The hackers may duplicate your embedded firmware development or they may also want to reverse engineer and steal the design to gain competitive advantage.
Some of the common example of embedded product system hacking-
Well, the embedded systems were not much of hackers interest but with the increasing use of embedded product design in developing new products, they have become an area of interest for the hackers. Some of the common examples of hacking include the Misfortune Cookie flaw, which was discovered in late 2014, it allows the hackers to hack the routers and gateway devices. Another more threating hack was Stuxnet, it’s a worm, which targets the rootkit exploit designed to compromise logic controllers in the SCADA system. This system is used for nuclear power, sewage, and water plants and in oil and gas refining and telecommunications too.
The future –
Today around 10 billion embedded devices are being used across the globe and many of these devices have been designed without much security. These embedded product system does not have been designed with advanced security features and hence are more prone to be hacked.
As compared to the earlier times, today embedded systems are interconnected wirelessly or have wired connectivity which means there is more probability of it being hacked and it also increases the probability of security breach. Hence it’s advisable that embedded product design companies should keep the security features more advanced and less prone to hacking thus creating an infallible embedded system which is error free and free of a security breach.
