Ostriches make it big on the Internet of Things

The two big buzz phrases of cutting-edge enterprise technology, "Big Data" and the "Internet of Things", mask just how ordinary the future has become.

The Internet of Things broadly describes how all connected devices, applications, and sensors exchange data with one another, their owners and third parties. The term is usually used in the context of a near future where these "things" will generate massive amounts of data, hence "big" data.

In reality, the IoT has been with us since the internet was created. It's been growing exponentially since that first internet-connected coffee pot was hooked up to a webcam in the corridor outside the Trojan Room computer lab at Cambridge University.

For a sense of the true ordinariness of IoT, we can look a lot closer to home. The most recent statistics released by South Africa's mobile network operators provide us with a clear picture of how many network connections are active on their systems: at the end of September last year, 80.1million sim cards were active in South Africa.

Clearly, in a population of 52million, these do not all represent people. Quite the contrary. World Wide Worx research indicates there were about 42million cellphone users in the country at that point, meaning that only about half of all sim cards in active use in the country now represent individuals.

Research has also shown that the number of people using dual sim cards - in other words, sim cards from multiple networks to take advantage of lower rates when calling someone on the same network - is relatively low. Only about one in 10 cellphone users actively swop sim cards for voice calls.

That leaves a gap of about 28million sim cards that cannot readily be accounted for by human beings. And in that gap we find the most mundane IoT imaginable.

Sim cards are primarily being used for asset tracking - installed in anything from computer boxes to cars to shipping containers - to track them around the country. In the Oudtshoorn district, farmers even use them to track their ostrich herds. So those sim numbers include a fair number of ostriches!

For a brief period, sim cards were installed in traffic lights to assist in their monitoring and management in the Johannesburg area. A sharp criminal mind quickly discovered that there were no account limits on the amount of automated messages that could be sent and received by these sim cards, and we saw theft of the IoT on a grand scale. Of course, the culprits had never heard of the IoT - only of unlimited free calls and text messages.

And therein lies the problem of IoT. It is so commonplace that it is taken completely for granted, and we forget that it is about the connections between devices and assets rather than about the objects themselves. So as the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Everyday Things, it also becomes the Internet of Vulnerable Things.

In many cases, these Things broadcast their location, and in the very near future many will also reveal themselves to be gateways into the rest of the IoT for hackers and data thieves.

Breaking into the IoT right now is about spotting a gap in the system. In the Big Data future, however, it will be responsible for breaches on an unimaginable scale.

Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee.