Cybercrime has a significant impact on operations and your bottom line. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime costs are expected to reach $6 trillion in 2021. These costs will rise to $10.5 trillion a year by 2025.
What are the reasons for this rise, and how can organizations prepare for and respond to evolving cybersecurity risks? Keep reading to discover the cybersecurity war causes and how your organization can win.
What Research Tells Us about IoT Security
Several matters could be top of mind when thinking about the Internet of Things (IoT). Priority requirements have changed for adopting IoT, and cybersecurity is chief among them.
Ninety-seven percent of companies have material security concerns when implementing IoT. A successful cybersecurity strategy requires consideration and implementation at each level. To avoid pitfalls, organizations need to be aware of security risks and the most efficient ways to overcome them.
New approaches like secure access service edge (SASE) have emerged in response to this growing threat. According to Gartner, SASE combines WAN and network security services such as zero trust and delivers them as one service. Their research predicts 40% of enterprises will have SASE adoption strategies in place by 2024.
Mitigating IoT Security Risks
IoT systems and security are complex and require a solution that mitigates zero-day vulnerabilities. If hackers become aware of vulnerabilities vendors and developers have not recognized or are patching, they may execute a zero-day attack.
Organizations must implement a security strategy to mitigate these and future attacks based on the most common patterns. You must leverage technologies to reduce continuous security patching. Software updates can be challenging and costly in IoT. You don’t want to increase the risk of security issues if high or unexpected costs catch you off guard.
Operational awareness is crucial, as you must know the state of your deployment and if or when you are under attack. It’s the only way to prevent or lessen the impact. You must consider security as early as possible.
Why Is IoT Difficult to Secure?
Though IoT devices are becoming popular, they remain challenging to secure. Let’s take a closer look at the most common reasons behind IoT cybersecurity issues.
Diverse Systems and Processes
There is no single standard operating system or a single set of communication protocols. Different devices operate on varying requirements. The way those devices connect and communicate with cloud, servers and each other can vary as well. It’s challenging to implement functional security with so many moving parts involved.
Hardware Upgrades
To secure IoT, you need to overlay security measures in older equipment or legacy systems. You can’t upgrade some systems. You can upgrade others incrementally, but it’s a slow process.
When adding devices to your IoT deployment, you must ensure the device manufacturer builds in security from the ground up. You can read more about this in a previous post on native security in IoT device manufacturing.
Third-Party Dependencies
Third-party dependencies play a critical security role. You have little to no control over what a third-party provider does or make the specific changes you may need. These dependencies make it difficult to know and trust that data will be managed securely.
Limited Resources
Another overlooked essential security consideration is the limited resources within IoT devices. Compared to other devices, these tend to have lower computing power, battery power and storage capacity. These limitations can restrict the security measures you’re able to implement for the device.
The State of Vulnerability Management
We can’t discuss cybersecurity without touching on vulnerability management. More code is involved in device functions than before, which leads to more vulnerabilities. There has been exponential growth in deployed devices with high variance and diversity. The result is enormous amounts of new code and new IoT vulnerabilities with which organizations must contend.
Companies must then pay a high price to discover vulnerabilities and mitigate them, then patch and update. Research shows businesses spend $113 billion a year on identifying and fixing product defects.
Worse yet, much of your team’s time goes to waste. Developers spend 75% of their time debugging. (That’s 1,500 hours a year!)
Even with spending that much time, IoT often remains vulnerable. On average, 15 bugs per 1,000 lines of code make their way to the customer, which will result in more problems and cost more time and money.
What You Need to Win the IoT Cybersecurity War
Telit is a global leader in IoT deployment, offering a wide range of solutions that have powered millions of connected devices to date. What support can you count on and what products can you stock?
- Wireless IoT connectivity modules
- IoT and cloud-native cellular connectivity plans and services
- IoT connectivity and device management software and data-centric platforms
