The Omnipresence Of the Internet of Things And Your Own Security

From allowing your car speed and suggesting you the best route for your journey to making your house thermostat-controlled Internet of Things (IoT) is everywhere around you. IoT describes the network of interconnected devices with embedded sensors that contain software and other technologies in order to exchange data with other connected devices via the internet. 

According to recent research, by the end of 2021 around 35 million devices will be connected to the internet and this number will be doubled in the next couple of years to approach 75 billion connected devices. If we see the number of devices closely, currently there are three IoT devices for every human on the earth. These devices have an enormous ability to compute and report data to a centralized location without minimal processing power, in the coming days they would become completely powerless. 

Along with the increase in IoT connected devices, there are more chances of IoT attacks, in 2019 the attack has increased over 300% compared to 2018.

The Technical Oppositions of IoT Security 

According to an IoT report of 2020, it has been discovered that IoT security comes under the top 15 most crucial technical challenges of IoT. Today’s market-facing challenge like never before, they are trying harder to beat out unpredictable physical environment, latency, together with network bandwidth and device unreliability by a wide margin. 

Image source:  DZone’s Edge Computing and IoT, 2020 

Needless to mention security is of the utmost importance when IoT devices have full control over autonomous vehicles, drug pumps, manufacturing operations, devices installed in your home, the camera on your virtual assistant and many more. What if someone hacks all the devices and your security got compromised? 

Let’s take a look at what the developers have to say about the matter? The threat genre of IoT is extremely broad and complex, it not only involves the physical security of the devices but also the network surety issues. So, to entirely secure the IoT devices both hardware and software issues need to be addressed. 

Network security is complex because of the multiplication of each device with its own IP addresses, which means you cannot disconnect a premier firewall to block all suspicious as well as unknown web traffic. One of the best practices to secure all the IoT devices is to include a map and monitor all the devices using network segmentation in order to stop spreading attacks and ensure the security of the network architecture, it also disables the applications and services that you are not using.

Best Practices for IoT Security 

As per the industry experts here are some of the best practices to ensure the security of your IoT devices:

• Best security practices 
• Discover vulnerabilities 
• End-to-end protection 
• Proper policy and segmentation 
• Monitoring and threat protection 

A holistic approach is required in order to harness the security threats that will help navigate the potential pitfalls around challenging hardware and software issues.