Wireless reconnaissance and mapping

The majority of IoT devices on the market utilize wireless communication protocols such as ZigBee, ZWave, Bluetooth-LE, and Wi-Fi 802.11. Similar to the war dialing days of old where hackers scanned through telephone switching networks to identify electronic modems, today, researchers are successfully demonstrating scanning attacks against IoT devices. One example is the Texas-based company Praetorian, which in Austin, TX, has used a low-flying drone outfitted with a custom ZigBee protocol scanner to identify thousands of ZigBee-enabled IoT device beacon requests. Just as network scanning using tools such as Nmap are commonly utilized by hackers to gather intelligence about network hosts, subnets, ports, and protocols, similar paradigms are being used against IoT devices—things that may open your garage door, lock your front door, turn lights on and off, and so on. Wireless reconnaissance will often precede full-scale attacks (http://fortune.com/2015/08/05/researchers-drone-discover-connected-devices-austin/).