IoT Threats – How Can You Protect Yourself Against Them?

Today, technology is expected to be able to connect to everything 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Consumers are drawn to "smart" devices that make life more intriguing and easier. In recent years, business transformation has also been gaining pace, and the foundation of this innovation is Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Thousands of companies have successfully transformed their operations, and many of them are now focusing on business resilience – especially in the face of what has happened over the past few years. What can organizations do to effectively protect themselves against IoT threats? Sunil Ravi, Chief Security Architect at Versa Networks, comments.

IoT devices still have serious security gaps that expose companies to new digital threats every day. In addition, new technologies such as 5G increase the vulnerability of IoT devices to zero-day attacks and interference with their software.

Threats Posed by IoT Devices

According to estimates by telecommunications giant Ericsson, there will be nearly 1.5 billion cellular-connected IoT devices worldwide in 2022. There is no doubt that IoT devices are crucial to the ongoing business transformation. They contribute to making infrastructure "smarter" and enable data collection for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

However, the main problem is that they are not "secure by design." Connected devices often lack key security features such as authentication. With the market boom and the growing IoT offering, the potential attack surface is expanding. Reports of ransomware attacks regularly make front-page headlines, so organizations must make sure in advance that every device they intend to add to their infrastructure has reliable security.

The Internet of Things as a whole is not a well-researched area of technology, and experience shows that what is unknown is often a source of numerous threats. However, the sheer scale of the IoT market becomes a challenge. Given how many devices are designed with unrestricted connectivity, checking and classifying each one is a very difficult task for researchers.

Effective Protection Against IoT Threats Thanks to the SASE Approach

It is known that attackers comb through companies from top to bottom in search of a weak point. Corporate architecture is strengthened using advanced security tools and policies that provide a much stronger protective barrier. However, IoT devices, deprived of these built-in safeguards, are ideal targets. Once compromised, they become a platform for cybercriminals to launch further attacks and move laterally across the infrastructure.

The Impact of 5G

In the short time since the global rollout of 5G technology, it has become a natural complement to IoT devices. The enormous increase in speed and bandwidth makes it possible to meet the requirements for coverage and round-the-clock connectivity, not to mention the ability to scale the network for all IoT devices. 5G is the ideal solution for transforming business networks and interconnecting infrastructure environments, clouds, and IoT devices.

However, software gaps are inevitable, and like the Internet of Things, 5G technology has not been thoroughly enough examined by experts to be one hundred percent certain of its security. Zero-day attacks pose a huge threat to IoT and 5G solutions. Like the internet, 5G is not a private network, so as IoT devices are connected, the attack surface and vulnerability to lateral movement grow.

The Balance Between Security and Network Performance

Of course, security and network performance do not go hand in hand. If too much attention is devoted to one, the other suffers, which has a significant impact on network operation and user experience. There are many business-critical applications that are sensitive to network performance, which does not mean that security is a secondary matter.

The key to achieving balance is a targeted approach. Attempts to solve the problem by adding random security products are ineffective and will likely prove to be a waste of time and money. Organizations must identify the specific problems posed by IoT and choose a service that will provide the appropriate level of security.

The Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) approach has proven to be a valuable tool for compensating for the shortcomings of the Internet of Things. SASE ensures tighter integration between security and network performance, guaranteeing the elimination of weak points without distracting from performance issues. Thanks to this service, organizations can be confident that all endpoints in the IoT network – regardless of its size – have equal access to security and management functions. In addition to controlling data access and using sandboxing to isolate and analyze suspicious connections, SASE helps increase connection speed and reduce latency. Thanks to a single software stack, data no longer has to pass through multiple devices or virtual network functions (VNFs).

The Internet of Things plays a large role in ensuring business resilience, so organizations should protect their IoT ecosystem. This means investing in security from the very beginning, rather than treating it as an optional add-on. Although not every IoT device is secure by nature, companies can guarantee that their entire networks will be resistant to attacks.