The global number of live IoT devices has exceeded 13 billion in 2022 as ‘smart’ internet-enabled devices became more widespread across all industries including healthcare, manufacturing and retail.
There are a huge number of benefits to IoT. The data gathered from internet-enabled objects has infinite uses that can optimise business processes, create major savings and create new services, but as always – the moment something can be connected to another device, or accessed over the internet, it becomes a major security risk.
Common IoT threats range from data theft, device control and denial of service attacks to more complex infiltration attempts to enter and navigate through an organisation’s entire infrastructure via a trivial and unassuming entry point.
As the cost of IoT devices falls, and more become ‘smart’ the potential for vulnerable code providing an entry point for attack grows and keeping track of a growing list of objects and whether they are vulnerable is a full-time task.
The impacts of IoT devices remaining vulnerable to attack are broad. In Healthcare, having machines malfunction or give incorrect data could be life-threatening. In manufacturing, it could impact the quality of products, or lead to financial losses.
In most cases, the threat is multifaceted, as data loss can cause a loss of business outcomes, financials and reputation simultaneously.
How do you secure IoT devices?
Asset Visibility is a key part of IoT security, ensuring you can see every single object on your network, understand what it is and whether it is in any way vulnerable to attack.
Armis offer an agentless security platform which delivers complete asset intelligence. Network security visibility covers assets that traditionally go unseen, or unmanaged due to their obscurity. Their contextual device intelligence can understand what constitutes normal and abnormal behaviour on your network and can highlight risks in areas that could potentially be exploited.
Check Point has integrated IoT protection into their software blade suite with their newly announced Quantum Titan solution which blocks evasive zero-day DNS, Phishing and IoT attacks by combining innovative AI deep learning technology with their global threat intelligence and patented security techniques. The solution automatically creates and autonomously enforces zero-trust network access profiles for IoT assets, protecting them against known and unknown cyber threats. In addition, Check Point also protects the IoT device itself by analysing and protecting the device’s firmware.
Many systems can respond poorly to normal network and vulnerability scanning attempts, and similarly, IoT devices may struggle with the strain of being scanned. SentinelOne offers a passive technique that uses an agent to seek out any neighbouring hosts on the same subnet. They have built an extremely lightweight solution that uses targeted and precise probing, creating up to 500x less traffic compared to other commonly used vulnerability scanners.
SentinelOne lightens the load further by reducing alert fatigue and the need for manual triage for SOC & IT analysts by automatically correlating telemetry and mapping it to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Their Singularity platform forms a key part of our Managed Detection and Response service due to this lightweight, considered approach to asset visibility and enables our SOC team to deliver security services that can encompass IoT MDR alongside Cloud, Endpoint and Network services.
Speak to our teams today and find out how Pentesec can help you secure your IoT devices.
