Trend Micro Research Uncovers Major Flaws in Leading IoT Protocols

Trend Micro Incorporated, today warned organizations to revisit their operational technology (OT) security after finding major design flaws and vulnerable implementations related to two popular machine-to-machine (M2M) protocols, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Trend Micro’s new report, co-branded with Politecnico di Milano, The Fragility of Industrial IoT’s Data Backbone, highlights the growing threat of industrial espionage, denial-of-service and targeted attacks by abusing these protocols. Over just a four-month period, Trend Micro researchers identified more than 200 million MQTT messages and more than 19 million CoAP messages being leaked by exposed brokers and servers. Using simple keyword searches, malicious attackers could locate this leaked production data, identifying lucrative information on assets, personnel and technology that can be abused for targeted attacks.