The Unavoidable Acceleration of Everything - 2014 version
A blog post originally published in November 2014 on my (now defunct) Countermeasures blog
The Unavoidable Acceleration of Everything. What next for wearables and IoE?
It is perhaps telling that when preparing this blog post, I had to add the word “wearables” to the dictionary of my word processor. We are still at the very beginning of the journey into an interconnected “Internet of Everything” but the truth is that every beginning exists in its own unique circumstances. The circumstances surrounding Internet of Everything are these:
Devices and services are no longer designed to be discrete, the list of companies publishing APIs now includes sportswear companies, construction companies, retailers, governments, charities, pretty much any sector you can name.
Consumerisation is real; technologies are sold first to the consumer and brought into the enterprise by osmosis.
The rate of adoption of new technologies increases exponentially over time and so does the speed with which it targeted and abused.
The rise of crowdfunding (another word to add to my word processor) as a means of financing projects has led to an explosion of innovation and a consequent rush to market. Security continues to be an afterthought.
This journey is not at the walking pace of the Enlightenment that lasted 100 years, or the brisk trot of the Industrial Revolution that unfolded over about 60 years, it’s not even the canter of the Facebook revolution, from zero to one billion users in just 12 years. Now we’re at a full-on gallop (and if I’m lucky enough to still be writing about the next great shift I’ll need to think of a new analogy!)
Let’s not fool ourselves; let’s not be complacent. When we say in our predictions that devices in Internet of Everything will be largely saved from attack due to the great diversity of form, function and operating system we are talking strictly short-term and The Unavoidable Acceleration of Everything (there were zero returns when I searched for that phrase, so I’m claiming it) means that that short-term is forever shrinking.
In the absence of a common operating system or code base and in an ecosystem where devices and services are increasingly designed to interact APIs become the new attack surface and they are currently more than doubling in number year on year, every year and these are still the very early days. APIs mean business, both legitimate and criminal.
Attackers will continue to search for the weakest link. A compromise at any point in the chain of information will lead to amplified effects in unforeseen or unnoticed areas as devices, processes, people and services become increasingly both interconnected and autonomous at the same time. Complexity is the enemy of security, in the interconnected Internet of Everything, tracking down the source of misinformation or the point of compromise may become impossible for the average consumer or business.
Unless proper authentication of the integrity, provenance and validity of information can be designed into the processes, devices and decision-making of the future, we’re not just opening up a new attack vector, we’re opening up our lives, our enterprises and our homes.
Now check out my updated 2025 review of this post here.