IoT solutions are seemingly everywhere these days. From cars to homes, and even in industrial machinery, IoT devices generate a wealth of data that can be used to improve customer experiences. However, with internet connectivity comes security challenges. To realize the full potential of IoT devices, companies need to secure them and ensure their integrity.
Security is an essential feature for IoT since these devices aren’t viewed as entirely trustworthy by consumers. A 2019 survey conducted by Consumers International and The Internet Society discovered that 63% of respondents found IoT devices “creepy”. Ensuring these solutions are secure is the best way to drive their usage and provide consumers with better experiences.
Here are 3 best practices to help you secure your business’ IoT network.
Invest in Training and Culture
As with everything to do with cybersecurity, training is a key part of ensuring the integrity of your IoT network. A robust training program begins at the top of the organization. Senior leadership must make security an inherent part of your organization’s culture instead of treating it as an appendage.
From this posture, you’ll be able to design effective training programs. Many organizations design programs aimed at raising awareness amongst employees. However, thanks to the ever-evolving nature of cyberthreats, mere awareness isn’t enough. Your employees need to modify their behaviors.
The best way of ensuring this is to design collaborative workshops with teams composed of members from different parts of the organization. Conduct fire drills regularly and evaluate how your employees react to these situations.
The threats you face evolve daily, and you must evaluate gaps in security knowledge constantly. Is your security team up to speed with the latest attack vectors your organization faces? Does your head of security have robust plans in place to counter a firm-wide attack? Invest in additional training and certification to make sure their skills are always up to date.
It’s also a good idea to allocate resources devoted to staying up to date with the latest security best practices. Consider creating a security champion team that is tasked with updating your security team about the latest developments in cybersecurity. This frees your security team to focus on maintaining your network’s integrity while receiving feedback on what they need to address.
Invest in the Right Technology
Many enterprises adopt a static approach to cybersecurity. They install a single solution to protect all of their assets, conduct regular security tests, review results, and update their systems and practices. While they do all of this, malicious actors use AI to learn the existing cybersecurity system and render updates obsolete by predicting them in advance.
What’s needed is a dynamic approach to cybersecurity. Instead of conducting iterative tests of your network, you need to test it for vulnerabilities constantly. Needless to say, carrying out such tests manually is close to impossible.
Use automated security validation tools that will simulate attacks against your system modeling the latest attack vectors and kill chains. Automated tools free your security team to focus on mitigation strategies and vulnerability assessments instead of carrying out tests themselves. Your security posture will be more responsive to evolving threats in this framework.
While powerful technology is a good step forward, you need to review security basics such as access and visibility to applications. Often an unused or dormant authority can be exploited by attackers. Application access in organizations is often defined by seniority. Consider risk-based access protocols that grant visibility based on job function and expertise.
Evaluate your third-party software dependencies as well. Often, attackers gain access to your network through vulnerabilities outside your network. It isn’t enough to monitor your network’s endpoints. You need to enforce standards on every entity you give network access to.
Install Correct Processes
Every business function is as strong as its weakest process. Cybersecurity is no different. The challenge with cybersecurity is that it can be tough to determine security testing scope and mitigation scenarios. Often, automated testing tools suffer from the same limitations.
Their attack vector library becomes outdated and fails to simulate attacks against your system effectively. The solution is to map your security best practices to a trusted security framework such as MITRE ATT&CK. Security frameworks remove the guesswork from determining your security posture.
They help you identify the right assets to protect and also the right protection methods to deploy. As a result, scope creep in security tests becomes a thing of the past. Automated solutions mapped to established frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK update their libraries according to the latest threats automatically.
The result is cybersecurity processes that evolve as fast as the threats you face. It also helps to define incident management and business continuity plans in case of an attack. Assign backup resources and make sure they’re secured appropriately, away from your primary network. Prepare for the worst, and you’ll manage to deal with it should it ever come to pass.
Greater Connectivity, Greater Security
As more industrial devices connect to the internet to provide you with more insight into your processes, securing them becomes more imperative than ever. Follow these 3 best practices, and your organization will create a dynamic cybersecurity stance.
