The 2010 Stuxnet malicious software attack on a uranium enrichment plant in Iran had all the twists and turns of a spy thriller. The plant was air gapped (not connected to the internet) so it couldn’t be targeted directly by an outsider. Instead, the attackers infected five of the plant’s partner organizations, hoping that an engineer from one of them would unknowingly introduce the malware to the network via a thumb drive.

We recently had a hackathon at Grafana Labs. Anyone who wanted could get several work days without normal responsibilities to do whatever they found meaningful in the wider Grafana community and/or Grafana Labs commercial offerings. This allowed me to invest some time into Kraken, a project designed for reading out different sensors, and to update it for modern hardware and libraries.

The connected reality of gadgets presented by the Internet of Things (IoT) can no longer be considered as just a buzz as it has already transformed our living to a great extent. The connected things made our homes, workplaces, and transportation smarter. No wonder IoT apps are now one of the most popular app categories. As the latest statistics reveal, the global market share of IoT apps is expected to touch a whopping 520 billion USD by the end of 2021.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this June. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

Last year I started an IoT project, Plant Buddy. This project entailed soldering some sensors to an Arduino, and teaching that device how to communicate directly with InfluxDB Cloud so that I could monitor those plants. Now I am taking that concept a step further and writing the app for plantbuddy.com. This app will allow users to visualize and create alerts from their uploaded Plant Buddy device data in a custom user experience.