*****The following article, by Jeff Finn, appears as an online article in the Opinion section on InfoSecurity Magazine Home’s web site and was originally published on July 13, 2017.
In InfoSecurity Magazine: How IoT Device Discovery and Activity Detection Can Work
by Jeff Finn, CEO of zvelo
Even as IoT device volume races towards 200 billion by 2020, the vast majority of our connected gadgets still have little or no security features in place – leaving them ripe for the picking to any bad actor with some hacking skills and an agenda.
These vulnerabilities are especially threatening given the personal nature of most IoT devices, which, if compromised, could give hackers not only extra soldiers for a malicious botnet, but also electronic eyes and ears to monitor our lives from afar. The divergence continues to grow between how much we rely on IoT devices, and how secure they actually are.
Consider the reality that few professional sys admins – let alone the average consumer – have any firm idea of how many devices are trying to connect to the web through their local network. In both homes and places of business, visitors or passers-by carry devices programmed to try to connect to available networks on a continuous basis. In this environment, IoT device discovery offers a critical foundation to an IoT security solution.
Even the most tech-savvy consumer or sophisticated sys admin would find it cumbersome to grapple with a process of manually registering and vetting each and every device as it joins the household or enterprise network. That’s just for known devices; such practices would be little help in scenarios where someone with bad intentions introduces an unknown device to the network.
Instead, dynamic IoT device discovery and profiling – which ideally should be included as a module within routers, UTMs, gateways, or similar devices that are in a position to see all inbound and outbound network traffic – is capable of recognizing and identifying specific devices on the network, even with no foreknowledge of what they might be. Read more of How IoT Device Discovery and Activity Detection Can Work at InfoSecurity Magazine.
