IoT to generate 20 trillion gigabytes of data by 2025

Internet of Things (IoT) has been gaining quite a fair bit of attention in the headlines recently. SO what can we expect out of this emerging technology trend?

The Internet of Things is expected to generate more than 20 zettabytes, or 20 trillion gigabytes, of data by 2025, underlined by the increase in broadband penetration and access speeds, according to researched unveiled by Seagate Technology.

The research shows multiple device ownership and increased Internet speeds as being key drivers of cloud adoption and IoT.

Asia Pacific broadband speeds will be fastest in the world 
According to the research, broadband speeds in the region are expected to be the fastest in the world and quadruple to 87 Mbps in a decade, compared to a forecasted average of 72 Mbps globally. This means that a two hour high definition movie can be downloaded in 7 minutes as compared to approximately 28 minutes today.

While Asia Pacific leads in terms of speed, broadband penetration rates in 2025 are expected to remain disparate and varying between countries in the region. Developed markets like South Korea (99 percent), Singapore (95 percent) and Hong Kong (95 percent) can be seen as achieving ubiquity, while India, Indonesia and other Asia Pacific countries lag behind with penetration rates of 10 percent or less.

Majority of data will be generated by non-PC devices
The research shows that more than 40 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2025, and the majority of the IP traffic will be generated by non-PC devices. 64 percent of those connections will be used by machine-to-machine devices, 26 percent from smartphones, 5 percent from tablets, 4 percent from feature phones and only 1 percent from laptop PCs.

The automotive sector represents the fastest growing segment for IoT, growing from 200 million units in 2014 to more than 3.5 billion by 2025. Innovations that are already in today’s top range cars such as connected on-board diagnostics and automated safety systems will become more pervasive. At the same time, consumer IoT is projected to be the largest segment, reaching 13 billion devices by 2025, partly due to the growth of devices like smart watches and activity trackers.

According to the study, 11 million units of smart watches were sold in 2014, while its simpler sibling – activity trackers, shipped 32 million units. The total number of wearable devices in use is estimated to reach 170 million units by 2017, and that industry will be worth $10 billion in 2016.

Sales of fitness wearables in particular, will triple from 70 million devices in 2013, to 210 million in 2020.

In addition, the research identified smart garments often worn by athletes, like the smart shirts worn by Germany’s World Cup-winning soccer team, as having the greatest potential for growth, with an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48 percent predicted to take place between 2015 and 2020.

Adult Dating Website Ashley Madison Hacked; 37 Million Accounts Affected

Life is short. Have an affair," but always remember "Cheaters never prosper."

AshleyMadison.com, an American most prominent dating website, that helps married people cheat on their spouses has been hacked, potentially putting very private details of Millions of its users at risk of being exposed.

The Stolen personal data may include information from users’ real names, addresses and their personal photographs to credit card details and sexually explicit chat logs.
With a Huge Database of over 37 Million users, AshleyMadison.com, owned by Avid Life Media (ALM) company, is a very popular dating website that helps married people have extramarital affairs.

Cougar Life and Established Men, two other dating sites also owned by Avid Life Media, have also had their data compromised.

The Hacker group responsible for the hacks called itself "The Impact Team," a company spokesperson confirmed.

The group apparently raises an objection to the website’s morally dubious business model and were threatening the company to release all its customer records if the Ashley Madison and Established Men are not completely shut down.

The Impact Team claims to have complete access to not only personal account information of the company’s customers, but also their secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, names, residential addresses, employee documents and emails.

Reason behind the Ashley Madison Hack
The Impact Team of hackers appears to be upset over a website's service called "Full Delete" that promises to erase a customer's profile and all associated data for a $19 fee completely.
However, according to the Impact Team, Ashley Madison made money from the paid "Full Delete" service that does not work.

"Full Delete netted [Avid Life Media] $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie," the group wrote in a statement released Sunday. "Users almost always pay with the credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised and include real name and address, which is, of course, the most important information the users want to be removed."

The company denied the claims, however, is now temporarily offering its customers the ability to delete their account completely from the website free of charge.

If you are Ashley Madison customer, You should Worry
Avid Life Media is working with law enforcement agencies to investigate this criminal act and also using Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get the personal data the hackers have disclosed so far removed from the Internet.

However, It’s unlikely to be a prevention measure, because once the personal data has been publicly exposed over the Internet, it becomes almost next to impossible to stop its spread.

TeslaCrypt 2.0 conceals its identity to demand a US$500 ransom

Kaspersky Lab has detected curious behaviour in a new threat from the TeslaCrypt ransomware encryptor family. In version 2.0 of the Trojan notorious for infecting computer gamers, it displays an HTML page in the web browser which is an exact copy of CryptoWall 3.0, another notorious ransomware programme.

Perhaps the criminals are doing this as a statement of intent: so far, many files encrypted by CryptoWall could not be decrypted, which is not the case with many past cases of TeslaCrypt infection. After a successful infection, the malicious programme demands a $500 ransom for the decryption key; if the victim delays, the ransom doubles.

Early samples of TeslaCrypt were detected in February 2015 and the new ransomware Trojan gained immediate notoriety as a menace to computer gamers. Amongst other types of target files, it tries to infect typical gaming files: game saves, user profiles, recoded replays, etc. That said, TeslaCrypt does not encrypt files that are larger than 268 MB.

Mechanism of Infection 
When TeslaCrypt infects a new victim, it generates a new unique Bitcoin address to receive the victim’s ransom payment and a secret key to withdraw it. TeslaCrypt’s C&C servers are located in the Tor network. The Trojan’s version 2.0 uses two sets of keys: one set is unique within one infected system, the other is generated repeatedly each time the malicious programme is re-launched in the system. Moreover, the secret key with which user files get encrypted is not saved on the hard drive, which makes the process of decrypting the user files significantly more complicated.

Programmes from TeslaCrypt malware family were observed to propagate via the Angler, Sweet Orange and Nuclear exploit kits. Under this malware propagation mechanism, the victim visits an infected web site and the exploit’s malicious code uses browser vulnerabilities, most typically in plugins, to install the dedicated malware on the target computer.

“TeslaCrypt, a hunter of gamers, is designed to deceive and intimidate users. For example, its previous version displayed a message to the victim saying that his/her files were encrypted with the famous RSA-2048 encryption algorithm, and thus demonstrated there was no option to paying the ransom,” said Fedor Sinitsyn, Senior Malware Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

“In reality, the cybercriminals did not use this algorithm. In its latest modification, TeslaCrypt convinces victims they are dealing with CryptoWall – once the latter encrypts user files, there is no way to have them decrypted. However, all links lead to a TeslaCrypt server – apparently, the malware authors have no intention of giving their victims’ money away to a competitor,”

 Recommendations to users

• Create backup copies of all your important files on a regular basis. Copies should be kept on media that are physically disconnected immediately after the backup copying is completed.
• It is crucially important to update your software in a timely fashion, especially the web browser and its plugins.
• Should a malicious programme still land on your system, it will be best addressed by the latest version of a security product with updated databases and activated security modules.
• Kaspersky Lab’s products detect this malicious programme as Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Bitman.tk and successfully protects users against this threat.

In addition, a Cryptomalware Countermeasure Subsystem is implemented in Kaspersky Lab’s solutions. This registers activity when suspicious applications attempt to open a user’s personal files and immediately makes local protected backup copies of them.

If the application is judged to be malicious, it automatically roll backs unsolicited changes by replacing those files with copies. In this way, users are protected from yet unknown cryptomalware.