How Engineers can make Cyber  Networks Safer
With the Internet of Things ever expanding into our everyday lives, one of the main ways  engineers can make our cyber networks safer is to focus on making every internet connected  device as secure as it can be. With all these devices connecting everything in our homes, it isn’t  enough for our computers to be secure now, we it’s of equal importance to secure our  refrigerators because any web connected device on our networks can act as an attack vector to  gain access to the rest of the network. According to the lecture, “​AT&T has logged a 458%  increase in vulnerability scans of IoT devices in the last two years.” (Kirkpatrick, 2019). This shows  that people who would exploit these vulnerabilities are aware that there ARE vulnerabilities in  these devices, and things like smart refrigerators have already been used as bots in DDOS  attacks because of it. Many times, vulnerabilities can result from bugs in a software update, which  on a computer or smart phone does not raise too much of a problem as long as the user  downloads the patch that addresses the bug, but on household smart devices, can be  devastating due to lack of software updates available.
Another thing engineers could do to improve overall security would be to completely  update and overhaul the software and hardware used in our factories once they pass a certain  age. These machine’s software are more simple, typically receiving simple and unencrypted  information, and have few if any security measures built in. Because they are connected to other  machines in the factory, these machines pose the same risk as the smart devices mentioned  earlier. Any unprotected device with network access can be used to compromise the entire  network, assuming the factory in question doesn’t have an air gap in place to protect it.

References 

Kirkpatrick, C. (2019). ​Cyber Vulnerabilities In Engineering Systems ​ [Blackboard Lecture].  Retrieved from  https://www.blackboard.odu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_ 337579_1&content_id=_7299483_1.