According to a just-released survey of 950 IT and business decision-makers, only about 48 percent of companies are confident they can detect an IoT security breach. The study, conducted by Gemalto, suggests that it’s no longer human beings that are the biggest problem in IT networks. They state that today, the weakest links are connected devices. And they blame those devices most that are not tracked, or even known about. The article may in fact state a bit of the obvious, however it does detail all of the challenges of IoT device authenticity. Better yet, it recommends a number of thoughtful solutions for IoT device security.
Do a quick search on “people weakest link” and you’ll see a raft of articles in which cybersecurity experts and computer scientists point to employees or end users as the biggest vulnerability. No doubt, people do silly (or outright abusive) stuff and open the door for a variety of enterprise security problems. Spoiler alert: There’s this technology called the Internet of Things (IoT) and it’s a bigger security risk than people ever were. The new theme of this rapidly changing IoT security story is data integrity.
Increased cybersecurity risk is due in part to the variety of environments IoT applications touch. Most at-scale IoT deployments use some form of a three-tier architecture, with edge, gateway and cloud components.