What is IoT Security?
- While relatively new as a cyber-security discipline, the Internet of Things as a business enabler has matured into a clearly defined set of use cases solving pressing business problems that deliver operational and cost benefits across many industries, such as healthcare, retail, financial, services, utilities, transportation and manufacturing.
- The rapid growth of capabilities and adoption of IoT technology has guided a transformation in enterprise operations with IoT devices making up to 30% of the total devices on enterprise networks today.
- Rich data collected from these devices provides valuable insights that inform real-time decisions and deliver accurate predictive modeling.
- In addition, IoT is a key enabler of digital transformation in the enterprise, with the potential to drive up workforce productivity, business efficiency and profitability as well as the overall employee experience.
What are the challenges of IoT security?
IOT security can be understood as cyber-security strategy and protection mechanism that safeguards against the possibility of cyber-security which specifically target physical IoT devices that are connected to the network.
Without robust security, any connected IoT device is vulnerable to breach, compromise and control by ultimately infiltrate, steal user data and bring down system. Security teams are now faced with new and escalating challenges that are unique of IoT security including:
Inventory:
It is not having clear visibility and context for what IoT devices are in the network and how the security manages new devices.
Threats:
The lack of well-embedded security into IoT device operating system that are hard or impossible to patch.
Data Volume:
Overseeing vast amounts of data generated from both managed and unmanaged IoT devices.
Ownership:
New risks associated with the management of IoT devices by disparate teams within the organization.
Diversity:
It possesses the sheer delivery of IoT devices in terms of their limitless form and functions.
Operations:
It possesses the notification crisis where in IoT devices are critical to core operations yet difficult for IT to integrate into the core security posture.
In addition to these challenges, 98% of all the IoT devices traffic is unencrypted, putting personal and confidential data at severe risk.
Threats to users:
A compromised IOT device-places its users at risk in a number of ways, such as:
Data Theft:
- An IOT device contains vast amounts of data, much of which is unique to its individual users, including online browsing purchase records, credit cards details and personal health information.
- An improperly secured device leaves this data vulnerable to theft.
- What’s more, vulnerable devices can be used as gateways to other areas of the network they are deployed on, allowing for more sensitive data to be extracted.
Physical Harm:
- IOT devices are now common place in the medical industry, with examples including pacemakers, heart monitor and defibrillators.
- While convenient these devices are also vulnerable to security threats.
- An improperly secured device can be exploited to interfere with a a patient’s medical care.
- It is an exceedingly rare occurrence, albeit one to be considered when developing a strategy for securing IoT devices.
Threats to users:
- Insecure IoT devices are vulnerable to being hijacked and used in a botnet which is a collection of malware-infected internet connected devices, possibly numbering in the millions, controlled from a remote location.
- For perpetrators, discovering unprotected devices is not difficult and can be easily achieved by running widely available scripts or tools.
- This is best exemplified by the existence of Shodan, a publicly available search engine made for the discovery of such devices.
- As IoT devices have become more sophisticated, so have the threats that they pose.
- This has manifested itself in all manner of cyber-security, including widespread spam and phishing campaigns as well as DDOS attacks.
- The latter have been growing in size in recent years, mostly due to the increased availability of under protected IOT devices.
- One prominent example of this trend occurred in 2016 when a public released of the Mirai malware prompted perpetrators to create massive IoT botnets and use them foe DDOS assaults.
- This led to an unprecedented wave of attacks, the most notorious of which took down Dyn DNS services, cutting access to some of the most popular domains in the world including Etsy, GitHub, Netflix, Spotify and Twitter.
- The malware itself was a relatively simple script that scanned open remote success ports and tried to gain access using a short list of commonly used login credentials.
- Still, the lackluster IoT security measures made these simple tactics extremely successful.
- In the words of the alleged Mirai malware author Anna-Senpai:
“With Mirai, I usually pull max 380K bots from telnet alone.”
What are the best practices of IoT Security?
- The lifecycle approach encompasses five critical stages of IoT security.
- Network security and operations teams should be incorporating IoT security into standard practice, process and procedure to ensure both managed and unmanaged devices fall within the same level of visibility and control across the lifecycle of security in IoT:
- Identify all managed and unmanaged devices with context.
- Accurately assess and identify vulnerabilities and risks associated with all devices.
- Automate zero Trust policies and enforcement of those policies.
- Take swift action on preventing known threats.
- Rapidly detect and respond to unknown threats.
An effective strategy for securing IoT must protect devices and the networks they are connected to from the ever-widening spectrum of IoT security risks. To learn more about IoT security best practices, read the Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to IoT Security.
Reference:
Unit 42 IoT Security Threats Report.
