Chatbots: The Story of Conversational UI

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Technology trends, Uncategorized, User Experience & Interface Design

From self-driving cars to personal assistance to home automation devices to cutting-edge medical technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. As of June 2016, artificial intelligence received $974 million of funding, and experts predict that this figure will only rise. In fact, the AI market is set to reach $11.1 billion by 2024, according to technology research firm Tractica.

Behshad Behzadi, principal engineer of Google Now, says, “There’s an element of AI in everything we do. It’s just a way to interpret correctly either what the user is saying right now, or what they might need in the future.” Thanks to the advances in cognitive technologies, we can now accurately recognize natural human speech, automatically translate texts, and provide end users with relevant answers to their questions. These capabilities allow us to interact with computers in a conversational way.

If we take a step back and look at the history of computing, we can see how it’s intertwined with the various ways users interact with electronic devices. Just like Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), which were popularized during the 1980s by Apple, Microsoft, and Xerox, removed the steep learning curve of Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs), so can Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) make computers more accessible for the average person.

Deloitte analysis based on CB Insights data revealed that Conversational User Interface startups raised over $200 million in 2016. According to a report by Luxury Daily, 22 percent of consumers have used a Conversational User Interface to interact with banks. Gartner predicts that customers will manage 85 percent of their relationships with enterprises without interacting with humans by 2020.

Clearly, some of the largest industry players see Conversational User Interfaces as the future of how people interact with electronic devices, perhaps because millions of individuals around the world are already using Conversational User Interfaces on a daily basis in the form of Chatbots.

Meet Chatbots

Chatbots are arguably the biggest trend coming to social media sites and instant messaging apps. “Advancements in artificial intelligence, combined with the proliferation of various messaging apps, is fueling the development of Chatbots which can carry out different kinds of tasks such as scheduling a meeting, reporting temperature, assisting users with buying new gadgets, and so on. This has led businesses to invest heavily in the chat economy. The bot revolution is still in an early phase, but the enthusiasm is clearly growing rapidly among customers and businesses,” argues Ashish Kumar, an alumnus of International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.

What exactly is a Chatbot? One widely accepted definition describes a Chatbot as an interface that enables users to complete a task through conversational interaction with a machine. Simply put, Chatbots are very smart programs that you can message to get answers. An e-commerce bot can help you order the right pair of shoes for your graduation ceremony, a banking bot can help you open a bank account or check your current balance, and a hospital bot can guide patients to the correct ward.

Most of these bots live inside various messaging apps, such as Telegram, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp. “Messaging apps seem to become the bridge between today and tomorrow. They are the most frequently used apps today. Their increasing usefulness is the number one cause for the mass extinction of the single-purpose apps,” explains Radek Jezbera from Black Pine Executive Consulting, adding, “There are becoming platforms themselves enveloping services which in the past we needed to download, launch, and register within a separate app.”

In 2015, more than 1.5 billion people used chatting apps, which constitute 75 percent of the time people spend on their smartphones. In China, WeChat, a social media application developed by Tencent, is already considered the most powerful app in existence, incorporating functions like online shopping, sending payments, buying movie tickets, or getting a taxi. Soon, Western instant messaging applications could be just as powerful because of the high demand for instantaneous responses.

A [24]7 study, titled A Retailer’s Guide to Chatbots, Live Chat, and Messaging found that 25.8 percent of 1000 customers preferred to communicate with a Chatbot, instead of a real human being, while purchasing goods or services. This figure is surprisingly high given the current state of Chatbots, and it will certainly grow larger as Chatbots become more capable.

From the point of view of consumers, the advantages that come with living entirely inside instant messaging apps are clear: fewer installed apps, less time spent learning how to navigate various user interfaces, and better integration. Developers also greatly benefit because they can quickly reach a large number of users, instead of struggling to gain visibility in various app stores.

Chatbot Landscape

Most Chatbots in existence live in a few ecosystems that grow around popular instant messaging apps. Facebook launched Chatbots for Messenger at Facebook F8 in 2016, an annual conference held by Facebook. The company wants to partner with businesses to build deeper interactions with their customers on Facebook Messenger in a way that is contextual, convenient, and delightful, with control at its core, states the official press release. “[Bots for Messenger] can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages, all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them.” Facebook is also testing its own personal assistant, called M. The assistant should compete with Apple, Google, and Microsoft, who all have their own smartphone-based conversational personal assistants.

Telegram, an instant messaging application with over 100 million users, has recently made it easy for users to interact with Chatbots by adding support for custom buttons that exposed Chatbot features in a contextually-aware way. Telegram bots help users get up-to-date weather information, browse Wiki directly in the messenger window, plan tasks and set reminders, find relevant stickers or GIF animations, and much more.

With their Bot Framework, Microsoft is helping developers build capable Chatbots by providing various cognitive micro services that help bots understand natural language and intelligently respond to questions. Chatbots created using Bot Framework can be seamlessly integrated with a range of platforms, including Slack, Telegram, Skype, Facebook Messenger, SMS, email, and others. They can even run in a serverless, scalable environment thanks to Azure Bot Service.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Google is working on a messaging service that will deliver services through Chatbots, similar to those already found in popular instant messaging applications like Kik and WeChat.

All widely used instant messaging services see Chatbots as the right opportunity how to become just as important for consumers and businesses as the largest social networks in existence. It’s not just those companies and businesses that strive to stay at the forefront of the technological innovation, but also emerging startups without the resources required to gain visibility on the web who can greatly benefit from embracing emerging Chatbot platforms. The current small degree of competition in the Chatbot landscape is akin to the early days of the web, when anyone could get at the very top of Google’s search results page.

Social Implications of Chatbots

In his article titled Chatbots And the Future of Conversation-Based Interfaces, Daniel Newman predicts that Chatbots could permanently change the way humans interact with the digital world. In the day and age of social media, community outreach and real-time interaction with customers can make or break a company. Instead of hiring a small army of social media experts, 62 percent of organizations will be using AI technologies by 2018, according to Narrative Science.

This may lead to a complete disruption of the customer service industry. “There’s no doubt that Chatbots and their real-world counterparts, robots, will kill the customer service industry. They’re cheaper, can work any and all times of the day and can be trained up instantly. You can also replicate them cheaply, without added costs,” says Madhumita Murgia.

Right now, anyone in the UK can order a pizza from Domino’s through the company’s Facebook Chatbot, instead of placing an order on the phone. The Chatbot provides customers with up-to-date tracking information as well as the option to ask for the customer care representative should any problems occur. It’s easy to see how similar Chatbots could make certain human agents completely redundant, but it’s unlikely that all customer service occupations will be affected to the same degree.

Experts predict that there’s a 75 percent likelihood that the profession of a call center worker will be automated in the near future. As frightening as this number can be, we must bear in mind that call center workers are constantly rated as the most unhappy and isolated group of office workers. A 2013 survey found that call center workers experience the poorest interpersonal relationships compared to other professions, and that they are twice as likely as other groups to report breakdowns in home relationships because of workplace problems.

If there’s one thing we can learn from history, it has to be that humans always find new ways how to apply their talents every time a technology renders certain roles obsolete. There might be some period of adjustment, but just as typesetters were replaced by graphic designers, so will call center workers and customer service employees find other, more meaningful work.

“In the short to medium term, the main effect of automation will not necessarily be eliminating jobs, but redefining them. As the skills and tasks required in the economy change, our response should not be alarmism or protectionism, but a strategic investment in education,” writes Tony Andrews, a multi-media journalist.

That being said, there’s one implication of Chatbots that needs to be addressed: security. The machine-learning algorithms that make Chatbots tick rely on vast amounts of information collected from users. All data collected by Chatbots must be secured to the highest degree and deployed only on encrypted channels. Because Chatbots are designed to behave like humans and operate on popular instant messaging services, users must be protected against phishing schemes and social engineering hacks.

The biggest problem that businesses need to overcome is the fact that their Chatbots run on third-party platforms that they have little to no control over. As soon as a business decides to deploy a Chatbot on Telegram or Facebook Messenger, they are immediately at the mercy of the security measures employed by the chosen platform.

However, some may argue that the centralized approach is better than leaving security to individual businesses and organizations who may or may not have the experience necessary to protect themselves and their customers against the latest cyber threats. Even if a security vulnerability would be discovered, the owners of the Chatbot platform could immediately patch the security hole across the network, protecting all existing Chatbots at the same time.

Regardless of how these concerns will be addressed at the end of the day, it seems that Chatbots are attractive enough as they are that most current users are willing to overlook any potential issues, enjoying Conversational User Interfaces and everything they have to offer.

Conclusion

Right now, AI-powered Chatbots seem to be the next big transformative technology that will fundamentally change the way we accomplish daily tasks, such as shopping, contacting customer service support, or asking for the current weather information. Just like every innovative technology, Chatbots can end up causing major security and privacy nightmares, both for the organizations who deploy them and for end users. Considering how willing most internet users are to let social networks track every click they make, it’s highly unlikely that the same users would perceive Chatbots as a potential privacy threat.

When Will Smartphone-PC Convergence Become Reality?

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Mobile App Development, Technology trends

Older generations who grew up with dial-up modems and 16-bit software often struggle to see what attracts tech companies and a significant percentage of the millennial generation to the concept of smartphone-PC convergence. But the truth of the matter is that young people are growing up with smartphones that are far more powerful and capable than the computers of the bygone days ever were. It’s every tech company’s dream to create a brand-new market for itself, one with limited competition and plenty of room for growth. The introduction of convergent smartphones could create a market like this, which is why the race is on among software and hardware companies to be the one to make smartphone-PC convergence reality.

The Long and Winding Road to Smartphone-PC Convergence

The main thing that attracts people to convergent smartphones is their convenience. Instead of managing data and applications across several devices, everything would reside in one place. Modern cloud storage services completely remove any storage space constrictions, and responsive applications designed to support a broad range of screen sizes and resolutions take care of the software side of things. In 2013, Canonical, a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects, had made big waves when they accounted the Ubuntu Edge. This high-concept smartphone designed as a hybrid device, which would function as a high-end smartphone or be able to operate as a conventional desktop PC running Ubuntu. “The company had claimed to put the fastest multi-core processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB flash storage, had the incredibly tall task of raising $31 million been successful,” writes Raju PP, the founder-editor of Technology Personalized. Unfortunately for Canonical and thousands of their backers, the project flopped, raising only less than $13 million. The fundamental challenge that Canonical didn’t manage to solve is that of apps. Despite their efforts to make it easy for developers to jump on board and write a single app with responsive interfaces that allow it to run on any Ubuntu device, the total number of apps for the Ubuntu Phone platform is still abysmally low. Most apps are either too superficial to benefit from a large screen and full-size hardware keyboard in the first place, or the user experience (UX) is too cumbersome to be comfortably used on anything besides a full-fledged PC.

Continuum Could Change the Game

At the Build 2015 Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the launch of Windows 10 with the Continuum feature. This feature allows users to use their phones like a PC. “… it’s designed to take advantage of new universal apps that run across Windows 10 on phones, PCs, tablets, and the Xbox One. If you’re running a mobile version of Excel on your phone it will magically resize and transform into a keyboard- and mouse-friendly version for use on a bigger screen. It feels like the future,” writes Tom Warren. Continuum smartphones can be either connected to a wired dock or paired using Miracast, a standard for wireless connections from devices to displays. So far, Microsoft’s implementation is severely limited by the small number of Windows phones. The official website lists only three models—HP Elite x3, Alcatel IDOL 4S, and Lumia 950—which is abysmal by any standards. Despite this immense hurdle to overcome, the company is very ambitions. “We actually envision a world where the phone powers many more screens and experiences, where every screen can become a PC,” said Keri Moran, a Windows program manager at Microsoft. In the future, we could see a broad range of Windows tablets and laptops that are nothing but a display and battery, all powered by a continuum smartphone. To make this happen, Microsoft needs to do is convince developers to build new universal apps, hardware manufacturers to create attractive Windows devices, and consumers to choose Windows-powered phones over Android and iOS. If they succeed, the road to smartphone-PC convergence will be open.

What about iOS and OSX?

iphone-macbook-hybrid ipad-macbook-hybrid As iOS begins overshadowed OSX in everyday usage and adoption the pressure of convergence has reached Apple as well.  iCloud was an initial step to ensure data access across the Apple ecosystem of products, however, does not currently address passing app states across devices.  Any cloud-based approach will also be limited by large file applications such as graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and video production suites like Premiere, After Effects and Final Cut. One route many technologist and researchers are pointing to is a powerful smartphone that would be dockable into larger form factors such as an iPad, MacBook, or iMac.  If Apple can build a phone that is capable of being the source of computing and storage for all form factors, then seamless application state flow would be enabled as the source would be moving with the user as they switch devices throughout their day. Apple recently applied for this patent which indicates this concept is being explored extensively. One thing for sure is the road to convergence will be paved with intermediate building blocks like cloud-based data sharing while progressing to the final destination of seamless device convergence.

Limitations of Voice Control

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Mobile App Development

Considering how popular the two voice-controlled intelligent personal assistants from Google and Amazon—Google Home and Amazon Echo, respectively—have become, it may seem that voice is set to become the default input method of the future. After all, it takes little effort to say what we think, and even the current technology doesn’t seem to have too much trouble understanding our commands. Are there really no limitations or disadvantages of voice control? There are, of course.

What is Voice Recognition?

“Voice recognition is the process of taking the spoken word as an input to a computer program,” defines voice recognition Jim Baumann from the University of Washington. As explained by Gary Pearson, Co-Founder of Verbyx, voice recognition relies upon two components to generate the accuracy levels that are reported: a language model and acoustic model. Together, these two models provide an internal representation of how people using a specific language from a specific country or region speak.

Because voice recognition software relies on generalizations and rough approximations, individual variations in accent, tone of voice, pitch, and so on affect its accuracy and reliability. Some users are likely to have close to zero issues with certain voice-controlled devices, while others will fall on the opposite end of the accuracy spectrum.

Disadvantages of Voice Control

As Carol Finch writes, “Programs cannot understand the context of language the way that humans can, leading to errors that are often due to misinterpretation.” People are surprisingly great when it comes to filling in missing information and subconsciously correcting for speakers’ errors. Homonyms, complex deixis, and even complete omission of entire words or phrases seldom prevent us from understanding one another. While modern AI-powered voice-control systems are much better than the technology from 10 years ago, true natural communication with real-time feedback is still impossible.

With errors also comes the necessity to invest more time to correct them. This can turn a quick Google search into a minute-long order, which isn’t all that bad unless you add up how much extra time it takes you to get things done over a long period of time. “Most of the time it really would be just as easy to press the button for the desired action (or macro of commands) on a button panel or graphical user interface. Saying the voice command, waiting for it to be acknowledged and the command sent is simply slower than pressing a button,” writes Aaron Green.

Another major disadvantage of voice control over graphical user interfaces is background noise interference. For voice control systems to work properly, you need to be in a quiet environment, undisturbed by ambient noise and people talking. Such conditions may not always be possible to achieve, although headphones with noise-cancelling microphones do help to some extent.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of voice control systems, Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications, a Burlington-based company that dominates the market for speech recognition with its Dragon software, believes that “within a few years, mobile voice interfaces will be much more pervasive and powerful,” according to MIT Technology Review. “I should just be able to talk to it without touching it,” Sejnoha says.

Modular Hardware: The Future of Smartphones or a Waste of Effort

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Technology trends

One look at the current consumer electronics landscape is enough to tell us that the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Consumers want choice, and manufacturers try their hardest to give it to them. The result is a fragmented market with devices catering to a wide range of budgets and requirements.

Despite this, most products, and especially smartphones, look the same. The mobile phone market has been relying on the same design language that can be attributed to Apple’s 2007 release of the original iPhone. “Most contemporary smartphones largely look the same—slabs of plastic, metal, and glass, with large touchscreen displays, front and back cameras, and physical buttons thrown here and there for good measure,” writes PhoneArena.

But there’s a form factor that has lately been trying to stir the stale waters and do something original. Major smartphone manufacturers and tech companies such as Google have been trying hard to introduce modular smartphones, with the promise of improved longevity, lower electronic waste, and features that exactly meet the needs of individual customers.

As we approach the connected era, it becomes easier than ever to see just how useful modular smartphones and other electronic devices could be. Electric technicians would likely be willing to pay extra for an infrared camera that would allow them to spot a faulty capacitor, healthcare workers would benefit from having smartphones with integrated blood sugar and heart rate sensor, and personal trainers would surely be happy to turn their mobile phones into full-fledged fitness monitors.

Past, Present, and Future of Modular Smartphones

Some of the earliest modular personal communication devices were released in the late 90s. Visor from Handspring, a maker of Palm OS-based Visor- and Treo-branded personal digital assistants, was most likely the first mobile device that allowed users to expand the PDA’s features using the Springboard expansion slot. Anyone could purchase a dedicated GPS, GSM, modem, or camera expansion module, as well as a large number of third-party modules. The only caveat was the fact that only one module could be used at a time.

An Israeli mobile phone company founded in 2007 by Dov Moran, Modu, tried something different with their 2008 announcement of a modular cellular device. This device could be used in various other devices, enabling users to personalize their mobile’s looks and features by inserting it into a range of unique phone enclosures.

Modu’s story isn’t important because of what they achieved with their own modular phone, but because several of Modu Mobile patents were acquired by Google in 2011. Just two years later, Project Ara was announced by Google.

Enter Project Ara

Developed by the Advanced Technology and Projects team within Motorola Mobility, Project Ara was a modular smartphone project which was supposed to provide standard smartphone components, such as processors, displays, batteries, and cameras, as well as specialized components and frames. “The big sell behind Project Ara was that users could upgrade or switch out components of their phone at will. So, if you wanted a new camera or a faster processor, you would just swap one module out for another. Instead of having to buy a whole new phone, just upgrade individual parts,” writes Christina Warren.

The project was inspired by an earlier effort called Phonebloks. The main goal of this open-source modular smartphone concept was to create an open platform that would allow third-party developers and tinkerers to produce so-called blocks. These blocks would be available in Blokstore, an app store for hardware, as Dave Hakkens, the company’s founder explains his vision. Even though the project has exceeded its goal of 900,000 supporters on Thunderclap by October 2013, it faces many difficulties, such as its overall economic feasibility.

So, when Hakkens started collaborating with Motorola on Project Ara, it looked like the future was bright for modular smartphones. While Project Ara didn’t offer such a high degree of modularity as Phoneblock, it still looked amazing. The central part of Project Ara smartphones would be a frame with a built-in battery, processor, antenna, radios, memory, and display components. The team behind the project has even developed a brand-new internal bus that can handle devices that may come and go at any time, offering data speeds up to 11.9Gbps.

Promotional videos showed musicians adding multiple loudspeakers and a high-fidelity microphone. Other modules were designed to provide health and fitness tracking features, add a secondary display, kickstand, storing compartment, and other more or less useful things.

Sadly, it seems that all work on Project Ara was suspended last year. According to Reuters, “Axing Project Ara is one of the first steps in a campaign to unify Google’s various hardware efforts, which range from Chromebook laptops to Nexus phones.” In other words, Google has realized that there’s no room for modular smartphones.

The Era of Upgradable Gadgets May Be Over

Project Ara isn’t the only modular platform that has failed to go anywhere. The sales of the LG G5 are below expectations, not in small part because of numerous complaints about broken modules and phone issues. “Common issues appear to be broken power buttons, blown out speakers, and issues with the small gap where the removable battery ‘chin’ compartment meets the phone’s upper body,” writes Raymond Wong. Among the modules available for the G5 are a dedicated camera module with a physical shutter button, a hi-fi module designed in collaboration with Bang and Olufsen to add high-quality audio playing capabilities to the LG G5, and a battery module.

There’s also the Moto Z and Moto Mods, a family of snap-on extensions that magnetically attach to the back of the phone, adding specific features and functions. The current Moto Mod lineup includes a high-quality speaker from JBL, a compact projector that can project up to 70” on any surface, Hasselblad camera with 10x optical zoom and xenon flash, a battery pack, a magnetic vehicle dock, and others. Unlike the G5, Moto Mods don’t seem to go anywhere, but it’s safe to say that they failed to become as popular as Motorola would have hoped.

What’s more, the Moto Z and LG G5 aren’t nearly as modular as Project Ara or Phonebloks were intended to be. Rather than being primary components, these modules are more like accessories—very smart accessories, but still just accessories.

What has the Future in Store for Modular Smartphones?

Given all the above, it may seem that modular smartphones have proven to be a dead end. That’s probably true, to some extent. Motorola wants to expand the Moto Mods program and attract indie developers and makers, and Otterbox has released a modular case for the iPhone, which gives users attachments for everything from tripods to lenses to flash storage. This goes to show that people still care about modularity, but only to a certain degree.

As Christina Warren writes, “It’s nice in theory to think you upgrade your gadgets, but for better or worse, we live in a disposable gadget era. You use something for a few years and then either gift it or recycle it.” If we compare smartphones from 3-4 years ago with smartphones that are available on the market today, we can clearly see what Christina is talking about.

“Moreover, the idea of actually upgrading your phone piece-by-piece is kind of a pain in the ass. You start out with a starter phone, but by the time you upgrade the camera, the processor, and the memory chip—you probably could have just bought a brand-new phone. And your new phone would probably be more advanced, snappier, and more fun to look at. It would probably cost less to just buy a new phone, too,” Christina adds.

What’s perhaps the most important is the fact that majority of customers only care about smartphones when their contract is due for renewal, and they can choose a new one either for free or for a small price. Modular smartphones don’t fit into this cycle, but smart accessories do. They could be offered as optional extras by retailers and cellular providers, and they would also solve the problem of how to maintain the stock of modules.

With Bluetooth 5 officially adopted by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) as the latest version of the Bluetooth core specification, there’s nothing stopping smartphone manufacturers and third-party accessories manufacturers from creating a new generation of mobile phone accessories—one that would fulfill the promises made by the developers of modular smartphones.

It will still take some time before such accessories hit the market, but Moto Mods and the modular iPhone case from Otterbox already hint at what they could offer and how they could bridge the gap between fully modular smartphones and dumb accessories.

Is IoT Apocalypse Upon Us?

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

Infecting 2,400 TalkTalk routers in the United Kingdom, disrupting internet service for more than 900,000 Deutsche Telekom customers in Germany, and successfully bringing down Dyn, a major US internet provider, to its knees with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These are just a few recent notches on the proverbial belt of Mirai, a highly resilient malware that “spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords,” explains Brian Krebs, an American journalist and investigative reporter and a victim of the historically largest distributed denial-of-service attack against KrebsOnSecurity, his security news and investigation website.

Mirai (未来) is a Japanese word that means future. The name was given to the malware by Anna-senpai, a member of the hacking community Hackforums. “When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn’t planning on staying in it long,” begins Anna-senpai (Senpai is an honorific suffix in Japanese that is used to refer to superiors and seniors) the now notorious forum post in which the author of the malware publicly released its source code. In the post, Anna-senpai then proceeds to give detailed instructions how to use the botnet, adjust its various configuration options, set up cross-compilers, among other things.

Since the public release of the source code, there have been a number of new Mirai variants involved in several large-scale IoT attacks. Rick Holland, vice president of strategy at the cyber security defense firm Digital Shadows, says that “Digital Shadows researchers have observed a growing community of Mirai users asking for help and offering each other tips and advice.”

The thing that makes Mirai so effective is not that the malware is particularly well-designed or that it leverages some unknown vulnerability through clever programming. Mirai is so effective because it is highly adaptable, allowing it to quickly take over newly released IoT devices.

Market Explosion

According to IDC, by 2020, the global IoT market is forecast to grow to nearly $1.7 trillion as a result of over 200 billion devices, a steep rise from 15 billion devices that are connected today. It seems that everyone is developing new IoT solutions for established industries to niche markets alike. Things are moving so fast that before one company starts selling their recently-announced internet-enabled security camera, half a dozen of other companies launch similar cameras to compete with them.

In a market like this, one cannot afford to delay the launch even by a single day. Security and optimization often have to give way to core features and Kickstarter promises. Consequently, people are adopting vulnerable products that directly access the internet, making them easy targets for malware such as Mirai.

Most people don’t even realize that they have been affected by IoT malware in the first place. The particular device may act up, the internet speed may occasionally drop to a crawl, but nothing worse usually happens. “The ultimate goal for many of these IoT threats is to build strong botnets in order to launch distributed denial of service attacks,” Symantec researchers say. In other words, end-users are not the primary target; they are merely a means to an end.

As such, customers themselves have very little incentive to do anything about the situation. Why pay $30 more for an older version of a LED light bulb and a few vague promises about security when the potential negative consequences of buying a less secure alternative seem so farfetched?

“The perfect storm is brewing that will pummel our Nation’s public and private critical infrastructures with wave upon wave of devastating cyber attacks. The Mirai malware offers malicious cyber actors an asymmetric quantum leap in capability; not because of sophistication or any innovative DDoS code, rather it offers a powerful development platform that can be optimized and customized according to the desired outcome of a layered attack by an unsophisticated adversary,” write James Scott and Drew Spaniel in the introductory paragraph to their Rise of the Machines research paper written in December 2016 for the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

Security as a Priority

Sadly, there is nothing that can be done to slow down the huge influx of flawed IoT devices that are fueling humongous botnets such as Mirai. They will find their way to the market one way or another. According to Craig Spiezle, the executive director and president of the non-profit online security and privacy watchdog group the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), one answer is to develop a comprehensive IoT device certification program such as OTA’s Trust Framework.

“OTA released the IoT Trust Framework, a strategic set of foundational principles providing guidance for developers, device manufacturers, and service providers to help enhance the privacy, security, and lifecycle of their products,” explains the group on their official website. Their goals are similar to what the OWASP Internet of Things Project is trying to achieve. “The project looks to define a structure for various IoT sub-projects such as Attack Surface Areas, Testing Guides and Top Vulnerabilities.”

With effective IoT certification programs in place, the only thing left to do is raise consumer awareness about the importance of purchasing certified devices, instead of cheaply-made alternatives. This is where things start to look rather bleak. When we look back at email security, mobile malware, or even the recent spike in ransomware attacks, we can see a clear lag in consumer awareness. Usually, things have to spiral out of control so much that even mass media start reporting on the issue before consumers become aware of basic security precautions.

This could mean years of IoT Wild West, similar to the lack of web security during the early 2000s. “Mirai is certainly not going away anytime soon,” Holland says.

In the meantime, you can educate yourself on the issue, raise awareness about IoT security problems, use IoT security best practices, and, above all, think twice before exposing any part of your home, business, or physical infrastructure to the internet.