There are a lot more security breaches than people hear about, believes Ronald Singh, senior director at Digi, speaking at last week’s Hardware Pioneers Max show in London.

“We only see a surface level of breaches,” he said. “I think there are a lot more that happen that don’t make it into the press.”

He said some of these do a lot of damage, and was a continuing problem, even down to less scrupulous competitors stealing IP.

“And a lot is done by ex-employees when they leave the building,” he said.

Artificial intelligence (AI) too is helping the hackers as they can use AI to attack a firewall continuously until they break through.

“This is not a problem that is going to go away,” he said. “The genie is out of the bottle.”

Another problem, he said, was the many companies that did not think security was something they needed to worry about as they didn’t do anything that was worth hacking.

“Wrong,” he said. “For example, if you do HVAC, that can be a route into serious stuff in the building.”

He acknowledged that a lot of problems were caused by kids proving a point, but warned there were also bad actors out there. And he said the baseline for what needed to be done was dynamic.

“It will keep changing,” he said. “If you think the baseline is static, you have a false level of security.”

More people, he said, were figuring out how to make money out of this.

“It is a easy crime because you can do it remotely,” he said. “The scope widens the more companies that adopt IoT. We have increased security on all our modules.”

This was also in response to new security legislation in the EU and UK and changing regulations in the USA.

Generally, he said the IoT kept getting bigger as more companies saw ways they could be more efficient and gain revenue by selling data.

“It may take an up-front cost but it pays itself off and creates a revenue stream,” he said. “If you can sell the data, you can create a recurring revenue to give you an income. People also want increased data throughput. They are now sending bigger files. They may be streaming audio and video.”

He said if you wanted to do that with a wired installation, you would have to rip it all out and put in better cabling.

Singh went on to say the past year had been transformative in terms of Digi’s systems-on-module (SoMs) offering by opening up to new vendors, specifically ST Microelectronics, and extending the range of products using NXP chips.

“We have customers who just want a standard workhorse,” he said, “and then you have those who want to drive displays and want more connectivity.”

On the wireless side, in the past year he said Digi (www.digi.com) had refreshed all its modules, upping performance and shrinking size. Bluetooth has been added on top of core capabilities.