Less Than Half Of Firms Able To Detect IoT Breaches

A new research that has revealed less than half of firms are able to detect IoT breaches.  Only 48% of European firms can detect when any of their internet-connected devices have been breached, a survey shows.

In the UK, this figure drops to 42%, the second lowest in Europe after France, where only 36% of companies polled said they can detect if any of their devices making up the internet of things (IoT) suffers a breach, according to the study. It goes on to suggest blockchain as a means of securing the IoT.

Experts Comments below:

Barry Shteiman, VP Research and Innovation at Exabeam on why monitoring IoT devices and understanding their normal behaviour will help get an early indication of when the device has been hijacked:

“One thing is clear, as more devices become “smart” and also internet-enabled, they often are given the ability to send, query, or process information that resides elsewhere in the office, via network or cloud. To do so, these IoT devices often use embedded accounts that are difficult to monitor and may also have hard-coded passwords. The combination of smart devices with credentials to access external systems, via unmonitored, privileged accounts means that IoT represents a risky and unwatched channel for data theft or larger participation in botnet attacks. The best way to illuminate this attack risk is to monitor the behaviour of office IoT devices in much the same way as actual human users. By understanding what normal behaviour for these devices looks like, it’s possible to get an early indication of when a device has been highjacked by hackers and is likely being used to access and steal data. IoT will continue to grow and gain greater access to data; already a simple and lucrative target for attackers.”

Todd Kelly, CSO at Cradlepoint, found it surprising that there was such apprehension around IoT technology security concerns:

“Cybersecurity concerns are real but by using expert cloud-based management platforms and software-defined perimeter technologies, they can be effectively addressed. There will always be devices that are compromised and vulnerabilities that are exposed but just as we’ve built these technologies, we’ve also built the safety constructs to protect them. If we commit to tried and true security practices while adopting new approaches that leverage wireless, software-defined and cloud technologies we don’t have to let our concerns unduly impact our progress.”

Jan van Vliet, VP EMEA at Digital Guardian discusses the risk of default credentials and insecure configurations and protocols, making IoT devices easy to compromise:

“The reality is that a huge number of the IoT devices currently in operation are extremely vulnerable to cyber attack. Why? In their rush to surf the crest of the IoT popularity wave over the last few years, manufacturers and vendors were creating and selling millions of IoT devices as fast as they could, with device security seen as little more than an afterthought. As a result, the majority of devices out there today have default credentials, use insecure configurations and protocols, and are notoriously hard to upgrade, making them extremely easy to compromise.

“To make matters worse, the appearance of low-level protocol hacks are providing attackers with new ways to bypass and compromise IoT infrastructure and inject or manipulate data found within devices. This will have serious implications if the devices need to synchronise or receive control messages from a cloud application, with manipulated data potentially sending incorrect settings or actions back to the device.”