Cybersecurity24-hour view of cyberattacks in Florida

The Internet of things (IoT) – smartphones, vehicles, smart buildings, home appliances and other devices that use electronics, software and sensors – have transformed the way people around the world live and work. But not without risks. Data breaches and cyberattacks affect millions of businesses and households each year, hindering the integrity of critical systems, leaking private information and paralyzing Internet infrastructures.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science have generated a first-of-its-kind, large-scale analysis of the magnitude of compromised IoT devices worldwide and recently launched FloridaSOAR (security operation and response). FAU says that the program has been designed to detect exploitations as soon as they are encountered, and then store and share that relevant threat information with IoT operators across the globe. FloridaSOAR can pinpoint malicious attacks and infections in near “real-time” by targeted sectors and Internet services providers within cities and counties in the United States and around the world.

Elias Bou-Harb, Ph.D., an assistant professor and director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Laboratory at FAU and FloridaSOAR in FAU’s Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has received a $175,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation to work on proactive inference of malicious IoT events.

“We know that most attacks originate from infected machines on the Internet,” said Bou-Harb. “The technical challenge of dealing with this issue has been obtaining access to large volumes of data that represent an Internet scale perspective of this problem. FloridaSOAR is addressing this issue with large scale data analysis of a very specific type of traffic that is providing a global, Internet-wide look at infections.”