The widespread use of technology has led to different kinds of innovative applications in almost all domains. One amongst these advancements is temperature sensors that determine the degree of hotness or coolness and convert it into a readable unit, which can be further sent to interested recipients via SMS to help in malfunction monitoring or early alarming.

Medical applications, food monitoring, packaging, petrochemical handling, automotive monitoring, biological research, geological studies, HVAC systems and consumer electronics, temperature sensors play a crucial role in all these fields.

Apart from measuring optimal heat and humidity levels, many temperature sensors act as preventative warning systems that determine whether there are impending risks or malfunction. Overheating detection plays crucial role in those systems, thus protecting from major disasters like fire. Temperature sensors which are now affordable and easy to use may prove very effective in early alarming and prevention.

There are many temperature sensors, but they are commonly categorized as contact and non-contact temperature sensors.

Contact sensors are those in direct contact with the object they are to measure and include thermocouples thermistors, thermostats, thermistors, Resistive Temperature Detectors (RTD), and Thermocouples sensors. Semiconductor-Based sensors also fall under this category.

The non-contact temperature sensors measure thermal radiation. They are often used in hazardous environments like nuclear power plants or thermal power plants. Some examples: Optical pyrometers, radiation thermometers, thermal imagers, and fiber optic sensors

These sensors combined with external systems that warn of impeding threshold levels can send alerts via for examples SMS texts to the connected devices about temperature levels. Any untoward activity can thus be easily caught via these messages.

Automatic Alerts:

These messages can detect unusually high and low temperatures via these message alerts. This can keep track of the proper functioning of the devices. Any slight change in temperature sets off a notification about the rise or drop in temperature. One can take appropriate action by lowering or raising the temperature through remote control or informing the relevant offices.

Regular monitoring:

Regular monitoring can help to detect irregularities and easily map usage patterns. It takes out the manual aspect of checking on the temperature in a facility, unit, or device as regular updates are received.

Conclusion

Temperature sensors help improve productivity and safety by monitoring and tracking temperature levels across many industries. Combined with fast alarms and notifications, sensors are lifesavers in hazardous environments. They also help in the effective maintenance of devices and facilities.

SMSEagle NXS-line devices can be easily equipped with external temperature sensors, allowing you to take leverage their advantages in the rapid notification of problems via SMS. SMSEagle application allows to setup automatic alerts for the sensors and provides regular monitoring of the ambient temperature via historic temperature chart.

As the news of 5G towers are surfacing, we are leaving old technology like pagers and SMS far behind in the past. But with these rapid developments rise concerns about privacy and security. And surprisingly, the answer to these concerns sometimes is not more advanced tech, but a return to our technological roots with intention.

In this piece, we shall look at the need for notification systems in High Availability Offline Environments and why SMS Gateway services can be the answer.

Monitoring High Availability Offline Environments

High-Availability (HA) environments are well-tested and strongly equipped systems that are dependable enough to operate continuously without failing. These environments focus on avoiding single points of failure and ensure that their application continues to process requests.

In these high availability systems, effective monitoring and notification systems can make huge differences. For example, during situations of connective scarcity, effective management of notifications is crucial, as these alerts can often be the difference between solving the crisis and suffering extreme losses. Or during unforeseen malfunctions that run the risk of interrupting the business-critical application processes, notifications and alerts become extremely important as a lack of rapid recovery will lead to a snowball effect and harm the HA environment.

These notifications and alerts are usually in the form of push notifications, that is, notifications via mobile app, phone call, email, and SMS.

But for offline environments, the narrative is a little different. Offline environments may develop due to different causes, the most common ones being cutting off the internet due to security measures or internet inaccessibility due to the nature of the location.

Despite the offline nature of said systems, aiming to keep a High Availability environment is often the priority. As discussed earlier, notification and alert systems in high availability systems play a significant role. Most of these push notification features get bottlenecked when the systems are offline, except for two – Calls, and SMS.

What are Hardware SMS Gateways and How Do They Work?

When all the other ways of communicating effectively among peers are blocked in Offline Environments, only SMS and phone calls remain. And this is where hardware SMS gateway devices come in.

An SMS gateway is an interface that allows users to send SMS without phones. Hardware SMS gateways offer a direct connection to 3G/4G cellular operators, without Internet.

How it works? To send and receive text messages, hardware SMS gateway must obtain a connection to a short message service centre (SMSC) which is a special server inside a cellular network. In 4G LTE (packet-based all-IP) network SMS is encapsulated in a SIP message and carried over IMS core network to SMSC. In 3G UMTS network SMS is sent using the SRB (Signaling Radio Bearers). In both cases these are internal connections only within a cellular network. When a text message is received in short message service centre (SMSC) it is forwarded to its intended address via cellular network core. SMSCs are responsible for routing text messages and regulating the messaging process. If the recipient is unavailable (for example, when the mobile phone does not have network access), the SMSC stores the SMS message and then forwards it when the receiver is available.

Hardware SMS Gateways As The Solution

Hardware SMS Gateways are the most opted-for solution in High Availability Offline Environments as a communication system. Here are some of the reasons why:

• communication access via a cellular network (WITHOUT the Internet),
• on-premise installation that allows complete data confidentiality
• high reliability,
• remote accessibility

Hardware SMS gateway devices continue to be a feasible and secure solution to offline workplace disruptions.

SMSEagle provides world-proven and dependable devices as hardware SMS/MMS Gateway manufacturer. SMSEagle devices are easily configured and managed via a web browser, are easily integrated via integration plugins or API . SMSEagle’s Network Monitoring feature may be also used to you conserve your high availability in a small scale.

User authentication is how admins and developers like you and I enforce secure access to user accounts. But in the face of increasing cybersecurity concerns, our challenges have grown taller.

Look at the statistics. In the first three quarters of 2018 alone, attackers launched about 1.4 million phishing URLs. As you know, phishing targets a user’s authentication rights and identity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, most people are not taking precautions to secure their accounts. In a study published in 2019, 67 percent of participants do not use two-factor authentication at all for their accounts. Out of those that use 2FA, 55 percent do not use it at work.

This laxity to security puts admins on edge. So this article identifies and provides solutions to some of the problems you face in implementing user authentication for your apps and websites.

1. Getting Users to Set Strong Passwords

The passwords of nine out of every ten employees can be hacked within six hours. And two-thirds of people use the same password for most of their accounts. So imagine a black hat hacker stealing that one password, and it’s the same password for your online banking.

Users worry that they’ll forget their passwords all the time if they use unique passwords for each online account they set up. This fear deters them from following their admins’ suggestions even if they know better.

Most users don’t know that they can safely store passwords on a password manager. So far, it looks like admins haven’t done much in telling users about password managers.

The Solution for Admins and Developers

Tell your users about the dangers of using a single password or repeating passwords. Let them know that a secure password manager like KeePass, LastPass, or others saves them the stress of remembering passwords. These password managers also help them set strong passwords. Teach them how to use browser extensions for password manager of your choice.

2. Encouraging Users to Implement 2FA for Their Accounts

According to a Google Engineer, Grzegorz Milka, more than 90 percent of Gmail users do not use 2FA in their accounts at all. Understandable because most users see it as an extra huddle to accessing their account.

So they avoid it.

Albeit, users still want security. So they’d rather rely on password managers because they make login automatic and require fewer huddles. While a password manager is good, admins must let users know that the more security layers they use, the less likely they’d be hacked.

The Problem with Implementing 2FA

The problem is that most users are not seeing the risk of leaving their email accounts to one authentication mechanism – passwords or passphrases only. Hackers, on the other hand, are looking for accounts with the least resistance to hacking.

The Solution for Admins and Developers

Your job as a developer or admins is to help your users see the risk and understand its costs. So the question comes to “How do I help them see the risk?”

Let them know that attackers might have hacked their accounts already. So having a 2FA in place is a step to stop further compromise even if these hackers compromised their user passwords.

Here’s a case in point. Yahoo had been hacked since 2013 or earlier, but no one noticed until years later in 2017 when the announcement and investigation kicked in. That’s a full four years before people realized they’d been hacked.

Employees need to know that using two-factor authentication puts a demand on the account to notify them, the user, of any unauthorized login attempts.

Secondly, users need to know that they might have been hacked already and may not know it now until later in the future. So setting up a second-factor authentication can help them save their accounts. Security experts say that hackers stole anywhere from 7.5 to 8.5 billion records in 2019 alone.

3. Preventing SMS Spoofing

Hackers understand the power of 2FA, and they’re trying hard to phish their way through that second layer of security. In a study published by Thycotic, 68 percent of black hat hackers said their biggest challenge is multifactor authentication.

Consequently, admins and developers are saddled with the responsibility of helping their users understand and prevent SMS spoofing.

In case SMS spoofing sounds new to you. It’s a phishing technique that hackers use to gain control of their target’s information or devices.

So these hackers would send an SMS message to their targets and making it appear as if the message is coming from a target’s trusted source. A trusted source could be their employer, senior executive, or finance department staff.

For example, a hacker could send SMS messages to your employees that appear to come from you, the admin, asking them to click a link to give some sensitive information. Your employees would click the link, believing the message came from you, and then unknowingly compromise their device, share some sensitive data, or both.

Hackers can use SMS spoofing the same way they use email spoofing,

1. Collect sensitive information to aid their hacking activities or sell on the dark web
2. Take control of your device and use that access to perpetuate other hacking or identity theft attacks.

So you want to sensitize your users on how to spot and stop a phishing attempt.

The Problem with Preventing SMS Spoofing

The biggest problem with preventing SMS spoofing is ignorance on the part of system users. Additionally, admins are not investing enough resources in educating their users on how to spot and block these spoofing attempts.

Admin and developers might be underestimating the impact of an attack too, and that’s why they are not investing enough in educating their users about SMS phishing.

The Solution for Admins and Developers

Due to the high-level security that 2FA bestows on users, spoofers are desperate to break that line of defense. As an admin or developer, here are your options for preventing an SMS spoof attack.

Invest in Employee or System User Education

Educate your employees and users to not click on SMS links from unknown sources or that they haven’t verified. Let them take this phishing test.

That spoofing test focuses on email spoofing. But it sensitizes users to pay more attention to the messages they receive. Ultimately, attackers want to deceive you into taking an action that grants them access to your sensitive data or device. Hence you want to train your users on how to spot these deceptions.

Use a Signature Message

Set up a signature that goes with every SMS you send to devalue any phishing attempt immediately. For example, “Prevent SMS spoofing: call the number that sent this SMS.”

This prevention technique works because people who spoof phone numbers don’t own them. Tell your users to hang up and call the number back. When they call, they’ll reach the real holder, not the spoofer.

4. The Social Sign-in Puzzle

In the bid to improve authentication, developers introduced social media sign-in. The idea is that users would sign in to third-party websites and apps using their social media accounts, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail.

This arrangement is pretty secure. So the problem here isn’t with the security of the process. But the convenience of the user.

The Problem with Social Sign-In

Social sign-in saves users the hassle of creating new passwords. But these users must remember how they signed up for the service. Hence, this authentication often creates issues for users.

Customer Churn Because of Forgotten Authentication Channel

Your users may signup for your service, but since they don’t use it often, they’d forget how they accessed the site. If they have very little to lose, they’d churn and never return to the service.

Loss of Access to User Account After Loss of Social Account

A user may lose access to the social media account they used to sign up. If that happens, they may churn and stop using the service. Even if they don’t churn, users may define this event as a poor customer experience.

Security Concerns

Users may feel unsafe granting third-party apps permissions to their social accounts. This concern may intensify if the app requests access to “control,” “send emails,” or “make posts” on their behalf.

The solution for Admins and Developers

You want to treat the use of social sign-in as an experiment to know how your users find the experience before you discard or adopt it fully. Secondly, admins should provide backup sign-in methods for users in case they lose access to their social accounts.

Developers and admins must provide brief explanations for what they mean when they ask for permission that might deter users from adopting their social sign-in option.

End the Authentication Struggle

Most admins and developers struggle with user authentication because they don’t invest in user security awareness. Users will take more responsibility, the more they understand the risk that comes with being lax with their account security.

In summary, let your users know that

1. Clicking unfamiliar links or downloading unexpected attachments could expose them to security risks
2. They shouldn’t take phone calls without confirming the identity of the caller or never give sensitive information over a phone call
3. If they think their system might be infected or compromised, they should contact an admin

The cost of falling victim to a security exposure outways the cost of preventing it. Hence, you want to invest in prevention, and that includes enforcing 2FA. You also want to test user authentication channels that might improve your security and user authentication experience.