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Right Out of the Box: California Enacts First-of-its-Kind Statute Regulating Internet-of-Things

By Michael Bahar, Frank Nolan and Trevor Satnick
December 01, 2018

The California legislature had a big year in 2018. While a great deal of attention has focused on the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), a sweeping new privacy law often compared to Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California also passed a less-publicized, but highly critical, statute that will regulate certain aspects of Internet of Things (IoT or connected) device security.

The IoT law, known as SB-327, should have a significant impact that extends well beyond California's borders when it goes into effect in January 2020. Companies impacted by SB-327 — especially manufacturers and distributors of IoT devices — should work to ensure compliance with the act as soon as possible if regulatory fallout is to be avoided come January 2020.

What Does the IoT Statute Cover?

As “smart” devices, like Internet-connected refrigerators, coffee makers and even industrial control systems for the nation's critical infrastructure become more prevalent, the opportunity for device hacking and improper use becomes more widespread and potentially more devastating. For example, the Mirai botnet, which took down a large swath of the Internet in 2016, gained control of poorly protected IoT devices and used them to carry out one of the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on record.

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