The Internet of Things Lab as Avast calls it, is created to experiment with IoT and invent new devices and technologies in the field. Obviously, the emphasis is on testing new devices for their security.
The best part of this setup is that it is open to visitors. People can come to check out the laboratory and understand technology better. The Internet of Things Lab is built in the lobby of Avast’s headquarters at Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.
The lab is the vision of Vladislav Iliushin and Marko Žbirka, IoT threat researchers at Avast. When you look at what it has to offer, you can see three state-of-the-art 3D printers, a faraday cage built to test out radio frequencies, 30 WiFi routers, 6 kilometers of cabling and more!
With the help of the facilities available at the lab, researches can experiment with existing and new IoT devices, testing them for cybersecurity flaws. And if you were to believe that today’s modern devices are failure proof, then Avast has set up a demonstration where they have hacked into a coffee maker and use it to remotely turn on a coffee machine.
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Even though viruses and malware are software creation, the new lab at Avast is also capable of helping researchers check IoT devices on a hardware level. Industry-standard tools and microscopes help the researchers to pinpoint any hardware flaw that could make the devices vulnerable to software attacks.
To the question of why Avast, a software company, has to spend this much resources into creating hardware workshops, illushin had this to say “A lot of people ask us why do we need the IoT Lab and all the hardware. The answer is simple: Bad guys don’t care if we’re a software company doing security. They use many tools to find vulnerabilities in devices, and we will use all tools and means necessary to stop them.”
The whole setup is connected to a 10-gigabyte-per-second connection which gives blazing-fast internet download and upload speeds to the company. This ensures that Avast can make quick actions in mere seconds rather than minutes.
And when you are a security solution provider, every second count!