The number of IoT devices have drastically increased, causing your network to be at risk
by Mig Paredes – Sr. Director, Partnerships
It’s amazing to note the number of things we monitor on any given day, from detailing our phone usage to health diagnostic tools that we incorporate to track our pulse, measure blood pressure or monitor our blood sugar levels.
IoT Making Life Easier
In fact, we don’t stop there. In our homes, we keep track of temperature, humidity, electric usage, home appliances, property access, home safety sensors. We even order and track groceries through our refrigerators with optional delivery methods. Our cars provide oil, gas and location statuses within the appropriate apps, while insurance companies hand out discounts for those who consent to being monitored for good driving behavior.
Information sharing is at an all-time high!
Information sharing is at an all-time high! While marketers have never had it so good as our internet searches and buying patterns are easier to track and if that was not enough. We share enough information about our lives on social media to stack countless volumes of old-style photo albums.
Monitoring our usage of tools and entertainment devices is common because the rewards in efficiencies, accessibility and savings are easy enough to define and measure. Consumers find it useful and rewarding to have their driving habits monitored for potential discounts. While insurance providers can validate their risk exposure by non-intrusive methods of measuring speed, hard braking, and associate GPS statistics.
Device Vulnerability
In physical security, the long arc of network adoption has been in full swing even long after video recorders and cameras adopted this method of communications. Other physical security devices, like microphones, speakers, card readers, smoke detectors and carbon monoxide sensors, are quickly joining. While these specialized devices are not sold in the same volume as refrigerators and home temperature control modules, these items greatly affect the lives, critical infrastructure, businesses and property values they help secure and warrant the same level of serious monitoring.
Unfortunately, there tends to be a lack of traditional IT oversight, the slow adoption of standards and metrics by manufacturers, and a small pool of qualified cybersecurity professionals to design, install, and manage these systems. These factors create opportunities for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in a network. It is too often that physical security networks are breached because they are adjacent to more valued and targeted corporate networks.
Yet, all is not lost!
Hope in Solutions
Yet, all is not lost! The same efficiencies gained by your home appliances through networking are now available to service providers of security solutions. By simplifying and automating the best of IT practices, we are now able to not only provide information about your network video recording (NVR) hardware status. Through proactive monitoring, we can alert on malware, unauthorized use, device authentication, network traffic, excessive reconnects and even save you the trouble of rolling out a truck to reboot a device.
As I read my weekly smartphone usage summary and note the number of hours spent watching YouTube videos, let me encourage all of us to adopt practices to provide the necessary visibility to the devices that really matter – those that help secure and protect us through proper and proactive monitoring.
Sources: IHS Markit, D6 Research, IT Governance
