IoT facing Information Security: The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that has been happening since 2009 and is expected to keep growing.
Due to the digital transformation, consumers, industries and companies use several types of IoT devices.
Like all emerging technology, the rush of manufacturers to release products quickly can jeopardize some basic precepts regarding information security.
Thus, devices that rely on IoT can pose a huge risk to user safety and data privacy. Keep reading and better understand the main challenges of information security in IoT!
What Is IoT?
The Internet of Things is a technology capable of allowing physical devices to communicate and interact with each other. Many of these actions and communications are done automatically.
“Things” can be any physical devices built by human hands to send and receive data over a wireless or wired network.
So, chips, security cameras, doors, and electronic car equipment, in short, an infinity of devices, can fit into this classification. In companies, IoT guarantees improvements in several aspects.
This technology directly affects the relationship with the customer, the development of differentiated products, cost reduction, efficiency and operational productivity.
However, it is worth noting that the IoT impacts the privacy of people and companies, directly related to various information security challenges.
In this way, if the data collected by these devices are hacked, the company can suffer many losses, from financial to customer trust. Therefore, it is extremely important to think about information security solutions for IoT.
Information Security X IoT
It is common for manufacturers to invest heavily in processing power and connectivity with a low level of security in the IoT.
In this way, the device becomes more susceptible to hacker intrusions. This is because there is the possibility of accessing and managing microphones, security cameras and the location of these products.
Keeping hackers away from the IoT environment is one of the great challenges of information security to be overcome due to the various existing bottlenecks.
Among them, the most present in these devices are the absence of encryption, insufficient or weak authentication, insecure Web Interface, flawed security settings and insecure clouds.
See the other IoT security flaws :
Immaturity Of IoT Systems And Devices
As they are recent products, devices that support IoT have maturity counted in months (or a few years).
As such, the security level has yet to be fully tested. So this is a wide-open door for any hacker to break in.
Missing Master Password
Every device that accesses the internet must be connected to a router via ethernet cable or WIFI.
Many products do not provide a master password to prevent unauthorized persons from accessing the device.
With this, anyone who has access to the intranet subnet (internal ethernet or WIFI network) or is within range of the WIFI router will be able to enter the configuration of the IoT device and change the data.
Absence of SSL, TSL
Due to the immaturity of the available IoT components, many programming tools available to generate the firmware (software embedded inside the IoT device ) do not have libraries that support SSL ( Secure Socket Layer ) or TLS ( Transport Layer Security), or these were released very recently.
As a result, manufacturers have yet to be able to incorporate some level of security into TCP-IP (and UDP) communications and are thus completely vulnerable to hackers.
How To Face These Challenges?
Faced with this scenario of insecurity, there are two ways to face these challenges:
The first, which should be considered at the purchase stage, is prioritizing devices from companies that provide security and update systems.
If you want to protect your company’s data security, it’s important not to be seduced by cheap products.
Know that professional products are expensive but have a long-term return guarantee. That is, for the peace of mind they will provide you and for the safety in its use.
So, this is essential for you to have more information security using IoT devices. The second, more efficient way is through monitoring. This is because monitoring activities scan the entire environment extensively.
The main items verified in the monitoring are IoT devices, servers, workstations, links, switches, storages, routers, networks, firewalls and backups.
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