Cybersecurity threats, countermeasures and mitigation techniques on the IoT: Future research directions

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gotten a lot of interest from the information and communication technology community. The availability of tools afforded by this paradigm, such as environmental monitoring using user data and everyday items, is one of the key reasons. In addition, the IoT infrastructure's capabilities enable the creation of a wide range of new business models and applications such as smart homes, smart cities and e-health. However, there are still concerns over the security issues that need addressing to ensure an appropriate deployment. With the increasing threat of cyber-attacks, cybersecurity has emerged as one of the most critical aspects on the IoT. IoT cybersecurity aims to secure IoT assets and privacy while lowering cybersecurity risks for enterprises and consumers. In addition, new cybersecurity tools and technology have the potential to improve IoT security management. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the classification of cyber threats, attacks in IoT layers. The study’s findings show that viruses, spyware and malware attacks were the most prevalent technical threats in IoT application layer, each accounting for 30% of incidents. Malicious code attacks were identified as the second rank of main threats and attacks that representing 20% of incidents. While, phishing attacks was identified as the third level of main threats and attacks that representing 15% of incidents. In fourth classification was cross-site scripting and Botnet attacks, with 10% of incidents in IoT application layer. The results from this research could help organizations in understanding the main types of cyber-attacks in IoT applications in order to develop robust methods against these types of these attacks.