Consumer Awareness on Security and Privacy Threat of Medical Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) are being enthusiastically adopted by consumers. By the year 2020 the sum of 31 billon IoT devices will be deployed globally. Subsequent as the IoT device landscape is expanding at such speed, so does the threat landscape and vulnerabilities it introduces increases. Thus, making IoT devices easily prone to attacks or to be used to for launching attacks at large economical scale and society is seeing a growth in the scale and frequencies of these attacks. The large scale of attacks and frequency have caught global attention and causing governments to take the security and privacy threats of IoT very seriously and the UK government amongst others are now turning these concerns into actionable measures by considering ways of protecting consumers against the vulnerabilities and threats of IoT. It is part of these actionable measures that the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) recently published in a report about the new laws being proposed by the government to strengthen IoT devices. This chapter will look at the IoT security threats and privacy issues, it will explore whether the growing concern of the government to protect consumer has a foundation by investigating consumers awareness and attitude towards IoT security threats and privacy issues and propose a framework to facilitate the introduction of the new initiative of the government to bring in laws to govern IoT products thereby shifting the responsibility of the security threats to the manufacturers and away from the consumer.