“IoT Security is a practice to keep your systems connected with the Internet, safe and shielded.”
Businesses are familiar with the positives of the Internet of Things (IoT) and closely realize its significance and the opportunities it provides to improve productivity, expand connectivity, and increase progression.
But many fail to understand the challenges and threats that come along with every innovation of technology and suffer the consequences of the negligence made on the part of security.
IoT devices work with internet connectivity and base their execution on processing different types of data. Data is the main feed around which the entire game of IoT revolves.
Preventing data sabotage, transmitting data securely, and avoiding botnet attacks, are a few novel challenges that must be handled with strenuous care to ensure the protection of IoT devices against security risks and vulnerabilities.
What is IoT Security?
IoT security is securing Internet devices and the network they work on from the probable and potential risks while identifying, monitoring, and analyzing these for fixtures of the threat loopholes.
IoT security provides far-sighted visibility and control of e-devices that are internet-connected to facilitate the exchange or collection of data. Compared with the norms of traditional network security, IoT security demands greater controls and robust technology to combat digital machines/software running with a criminal motive.
Why Is IoT Security Important?
With IoT embedded into a majority of daily use digital assets like cars, homes, industries, businesses, etc.It becomes fundamental to keep them protected from malicious actors who strive to compromise the security of the IoT devices.
IoT security solutions are designed to ensure the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of internet-powered devices and to protect them from vulnerable cyber threats. It enhances the visibility of the e-devices to know which ones are communicating through which network, and thus, provides complete control over data transfer and network security while mitigating the associated risks.
IoT is an inevitable part of digital security that prevents vulnerabilities and exploits to venture into the ecosystem and from jeopardizing the security of the whole.
How to Address the IoT Information Security Requirements?
Security requirements within e-devices can be fulfilled by applying an ideal and integrated solution that delivers visibility, segmentation, control, and protection throughout the entire data communication network.
A holistic approach to safeguarding IoT device’s data must be influenced by the following abilities:
- Learn
- Segment
- Protect
Once learning about complete network visibility, the security solution should authenticate and classify IoT-enabled devices to build a risk profile and assign them to the device security groups.
On realizing the IoT attack surface, organizations must segment the IoT-powered devices based on their risk profiles.
The segmentation can help build strategies to enable monitoring, tracking, and policy enforcement based on the occurrence of activities at different endpoints with the business infrastructure.
IoT Security Vulnerabilities to Prevent
Shadow IoT Devices:
The risk of ‘shadow’ devices is one of the major challenges to overcome in IoT security. These are the devices that are connected to the IoT network but are hidden from the network administrators or unauthorized by them.
These devices may get linked with the network knowingly (by attackers) or unknowingly (by users who connected their IoT devices to the network without knowing any better) and are prone to malware infection due to a lack of implementation of appropriate security measures.
API Vulnerabilities:
The next big vulnerability that poses threat to the IoT networks is through the means of API. As data exchange occurs via an application programming interface (API) they become a major target of the cybercriminals to exploit any flaws with an API to intercept data via DDoS (Distribute Denial of Service) attacks or MITM (Man-in-the-Middle) attacks.
As universally there is no specific API established for IoT devices but are provided by different third parties, it becomes difficult to track vulnerabilities accounted from these diverse APIs.
Lack of Reliable Software Updates:
It’s a genuine case of deploying IoT devices and forgetting about their security that comes from a part of updating those devices. With the emerging new risks to the cyber world, IoT devices become vulnerable to security exploitation.
Software updates come with a list of changes made to the software system used to manage the e-devices and must be acknowledged and run for ensuring the safety of the devices in use.
Default Passwords:
It’s human nature to carry on with things provided to us to make use of the systems or applications or our new email account without even bothering to change the default password.
Malicious actors of the cyber world are well versed with hacking by default passwords and gain control and access to the devices and networks which enable data transfers and processing. So if these are not manipulated intentionally by the users, they will be hacked by the criminals for sure.
Implementation of Standards:
IoT is a technology that is being leveraged by many enterprises to make the most of it. Nonetheless, when it comes to securing such devices adhering to some predefined standards, there occurs a huge gap.
Till now no unified standards have been set to govern the design and working of IoT devices and from a security angle, it poses threats to the business ecosystem of IoT devices as there are several variables at play.
With CodeGlo’s security team, we offer all round protection to your websites, apps, and organization. Get in touch with us right away for comprehensive, end-to-end cybersecurity solutions.
About The Author
Saravanaprabhu Shivaswamy
Expert at business strategies, management, and operations with two decades of entrepreneurial experience. I build products, teams, and companies.
