Why IoT Security Matters: Protecting Your Devices and Data

Digitization, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, and every new technology are a boon for businesses. These advances promise an array of economic benefits, improved productivity, and increased efficiency across a host of sectors.

However, there are mounting concerns that these technologies and how they are being used will pose a serious security threat.

Unfortunately, they can be leveraged as much for malicious or lethal purposes as they can be to enhance social and economic development.

Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that you have a cybersecurity risk management plan in place to evaluate and analyze the potential threats these devices can pose.

This will enable you to build a strong cybersecurity culture and strengthen your security controls while leveraging innovative IoT devices in your organization.

In this blog post, you will learn different types of IoT security threats, the importance of IoT security, and how you can secure your digital devices.

Let’s begin!

Types of IoT Security Threats Every CISO Should Be Aware Of

1. Social Engineering – Such attacks are commonly used by hackers to manipulate users into disclosing their banking details. They can launch these attacks to barge into a business network and install malicious software secretively.

2. Identify/Data Theft – IoT, connected devices store important technical and personal information. And if these devices are not cyber secure, this information can be exposed to malicious actors.

3. DDoS Attack – The intent of an attacker here is to disable or slow down the service of a business by sending multiple requests and causing a capacity overload.

4. Man-in-the-Middle – Such an attack is the result of a hacker trying to breach the communication between two individual systems and intercept the messages. If a hacker gains control over the communication channel, they can send illegitimate messages to different systems.

5. Ransomware – These are very sophisticatedly planned attacks that target IoT devices and smart homes. There have been instances where big brand names have fallen prey to attackers asking for a ransom in return for decrypting crucial business data.

IoT Security Best Practices

1. Manage the Inventory of Your IoT Devices

Keeping an inventory of the IoT devices your business network is connected to is an effective way to discover devices on your network. Understand what type of devices have access to your network and data assets and maintain a detailed and updated inventory.

Collect important information such as the manufacturer and model ID, the serial number, hardware, software, and firmware versions of the devices. Creating separate profiles for each of these devices will help you segment the risks associated with them and install a next-generation firewall policy.

2. Leverage Network Segmentation

Network segmentation is meant to divide a network into more than one section. This enables granular control over the lateral traffic movement of each segmented network.

As a matter of fact, an unsegmented network is at a high risk of getting compromised due to multiple endpoints communicating directly. A segmented network, on the other hand, is harder for hackers to get access to.

To leverage network segmentation, enterprises should use virtual local area network configuration and next-generation firewall policies. This will keep your IoT devices separate from IT assets and protect both of them from a lateral exploit.

3. Embrace Secure Password Practices

Password strength is an indispensable part of a healthy cybersecurity regime. After all, it’s the first line of defense against intruders. To ensure password hygiene, cybersecurity and IT teams should work together to enforce a sound password policy in the organization. This will also ensure strong system security at all times.

4. Implement Internet Honeypots

Internet honeypots are decoy programs or servers deployed alongside production systems. They can be deployed as legitimate enticing targets to trap intruders trying to attack a network. These programs provide intelligent mechanisms to help blue teams observe hackers in action and employ security monitoring at different levels.

Honeypots allow you to scan your network, investigate the vulnerable points and contain attacker access in response to an attacker trying to exploit your network. Thus, breaking the attacker chain. Additionally, honeypots are a cost-effective way to test your incident response processes and discover potential attacks early on.

5. Conduct Penetration Testing

IoT devices are designed in a way that they can be connected to any network easily. However, since their security is a matter of concern, organizations must conduct penetration testing on the hardware, software, and other business assets. Such an evaluation is crucial to identifying vulnerabilities, testing security policies, regulatory compliance, risk response, etc.

Pentesting is also an effective approach to monitoring and reporting IoT risks in real-time. A thorough penetration testing should be done before IoT devices are functional in a corporate environment.

Ensure that you deploy endpoint protection to all your network-connected devices to facilitate seamless integration of your existing security posture and a next-generation firewall.

The Verdict

The Internet of Things has connected and embedded the world virtually. But it has also dramatically increased the availability of crucial business information online. To keep hackers at bay and prevent significant data from getting leaked, you should ensure that these best practices are in place. Apart from following these security measures, it also helps to stay on top of the latest developments in technology and the risks associated with them.

Before introducing newly discovered IoT devices in your business network, you should prefer monitoring them to get an in-depth analysis of their vulnerable points. This will also prepare you to leverage game-changing technologies like 5G and develop proactive defense criteria.

Learn More Revolutionary Approaches To Secure the Future of Your IoT Devices. Begin Today!