What is the Internet Of Things (IoT)?

Thibaut Bernard
3 min readApr 11, 2021

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Internet of Things

Well, First of all, in this article i will explain what is IoT, secondly, how can be useful IoT on your daily life, and to finish, what is the main problem of IoT.

So what is IoT ?

IoT mean Internet of Things but what that mean concretly ? Internet of Things means all objects physical that are connected between each other and other services (physical or not). As example, your iPhone can be connected with your Apple Watch.

All these objects are interconnected in multiple ways as Bluetooth, Wi-FiIoT can connects a variety of objects, sensors, alarms, cameras, lights, and microphones, smartphone, smartwatch… These objects have an unique identifiant that make them unique and recognizable to other objects, this identifiant is the IP adress. With the IP adress other objects can connect with this object and give informations.

How can be useful IoT to us on daily basis ?

The main goal of all these objects connected is to give us more comfort in our life on daily basis or help peoples. For example, the Ring doorbell camera security system allows users to see, hear, and speak to visitors at their door via a computer, tablet, or mobile phone. IoT can help as example farmers to give more knowledge about weather statistics.

When you drive you can use application as Waze to give your more informations about the trafic, accidents in real time. Last example, Google use IoT to give us informations about affluence of a place, google get the informations of a lot of smartphones which is are connected at this place to make estimation of the affluence. There is a lot of applications in our life and future life where IoT is useful to us, without it our life would be less confortable.

What is the main problem of IoT ?

Now that we saw application of IoT in our life, we saw that it’s cool but it may be dangerous to give informations to a lot of objects that are connected between each other. In fact the main problem of IoT is that all these objects that are connected create a lot of informations about peoples called Big Data.

These informations are the hearth beat of our world right now and our future life, these informations help sciences, give us more confort..but these datas can be private as example the AppleWatch have informations of your hearth beat… Data can be send to devices that need informations to perform a task, so it can be really dangerous if someone try to break the connection and get these informations.

The massive 2016 Mirai botnet DDoS attack is an indicator of the potential danger posed by unsecured IoT devices. A single infected IoT device isn’t a significant threat except to the data it collects. However, it’s different when centrally commanded malware infects thousands or millions of devices.

IoT devices are much more vulnerable to malware botnet takeover since they are less likely to receive regular updates. IoT powered botnets can not only bring down leading websites but also jeopardize electricity grids, transportation systems, water treatment facilities, and manufacturing plants.

Hackers, governments, and business competitors can use IoT devices to spy on and intrude on the privacy of unsuspecting individuals and organizations. They may access, compromise, and use sensitive confidential information without the owner’s permission or knowledge.

To conclude

IoT has an important place in our life, it help in many different ways even more so in our future life but IoT still has numerous security and risk challenges and even more will emerge in the future. As the diversity of IoT devices grows, so will the complexity of the security challenge. To reap the benefits of IoT, keeping these devices secure by mitigating against the biggest IoT risks is essential.

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Thibaut Bernard
Thibaut Bernard

Written by Thibaut Bernard

Software engineer student at HolbertonSchool 👉https://github.com/ThibautBernard 👉https://twitter.com/__ThibautDev