Many thanks to all those who entered the Mendeley Brainstorm related to Hacking; picking a winner given the well thought out answers was not easy, however in the end, we selected Dr. Frances Buontempo’s post.

Dr Frances Buontempo is a post-doc at City, University of London in the Centre for Software Reliability, http://www.city.ac.uk/centre-for-software-reliability working as a consortium on a H2020 project using diversity enhancements for security information and event management : http://disiem.lasige.di.fc.ul.pt/ She wrote:

We are increasingly see IoT devices (including toothbrushes?!) which a little investigation reveals is just using the default user name and password. Many problems are announced on https://cve.mitre.org/ and people reporting vulnerabilities they observe is vital. You then need a way to automatically monitor your machines; not everyone will have a home network set up to keep an eye on their fridge or kettle or toothbrush. I found the recent “nematode” (anti-worm worm) amusing; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/31/this_antiworm_patch_bot_could_silence_epic_mirai_ddos_attack_army/ though it suggests a way to use offense as defence. A combination of proactively looking for problems, being aware of sensible measures like not using default or crack-able passwords, and also being more pro-active will help. In the long run, whatever you do to secure machines will be insufficient; in some ways it’s an arms race between sides. The trick is to catch problems early before any damage is done.

A sound prognosis. She also told us:

I am using Mendeley for my research, and have previously used it for a few personal projects. It’s a really easy tool to use, and visually much nicer than some other tools I’ve previously used.

Thank you, Frances!

Those who didn’t win this time are encouraged to respond to the latest Mendeley Brainstorm, regarding Open Data. Thanks again to all our participants.