Crash Testing your Connected Stuff — Before you Get Hacked!

People have to pay to subscribe to Consumer Reports. But you may benefit from a new wave of security testing — for free. According to Archer News you may soon be able to tell if that "thing" you want to buy will keep you safe from hackers or online stalkers by ratings and standards, similar to a nutrition label.

Rating security is not a new idea, as cybersecurity expert Jeff Williams (Contrast Security, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder) created his own “nutrition label” for software security more than 10 years ago. The label showed what kind of security controls the software had, and whether the code was secure, among other points. As Williams points out, food nutrition labels were not popular when they first came out.

“Everyone hated it,” Williams told Archer News in a recent article Crash Testing Your Connected Stuff – Before You Get Hacked. “Consumers didn’t read it.” Still, the labels ended up changing the contents of your food.

A collective group called The Digital Standard (led by folks from Consumer Reports, Disconnect, Ranking Digital Rights, The Cyber Independeent Testing Lab, and Assistance) are working together to create a digital privacy and security standard that "allows consumers to make smarter choices about the products they buy." 

“It (nutrition labels) had a fantastically transformational effect on the market over a number of years because the producers themselves wouldn’t allow them to put out a product—their lawyers and their marketers wouldn’t allow them to put out a product—that said, ‘This product is 100% fat,’ or ‘There are no nutritional benefits to this product."

~Jeff Williams
Co-founder & CTO, Contrast Security

Similar efforts to expose security practices could have the same effect as nutrition labels, Williams said...

This article first appeared in Archer News.
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