IoT in Cybersecurity: Where is the silver bullet?

For everybody using Cloud-based services, security is a key concern. Each week we learn of another organization that has been successfully hacked, with sensitive corporate or personal data shared with malicious 3rd-parties or leaked to the Dark Web. According to CrowdStrike’s 2022 Global Threat Report, the past year saw an 82% increase in incidents of data leaks caused by malware attacks.

So how can both corporations and individuals best protect themselves? Well, the short answer is that there is no silver bullet and that at some point it is likely you will indeed be hacked. No one tool or process is good enough to stop all cybercriminals, and the structure of cyberattacks is constantly evolving.

The key items to consider are:

• How can our cybersecurity provide defence in depth to minimize the likelihood of a successful attack?
• How can we detect a hack as quickly as possible?
• How do we close all possible avenues of compromise once a threat is detected?
• What steps do we need to take in response to a cyberattack?

Part of the problem, of course, is that whilst we all want to be secure, we also enjoy the convenience of being able to log onto multiple web sites with a touch of a button. Whilst automatically generated complex passwords and password vaults have helped with network-based attacks, if a hacker gets access to our machine via an email scam or the hardware itself, these are negated. We want the system to take care of the security, and that becomes exponentially more difficult if we do not follow secure processes that minimize the “attack vector” to keep our data safe, whether we are at work or during our personal time.

We will be writing a regular monthly blog looking at recent security events, their impact on IoT, and discussing how we can help to mitigate and prevent security exposure. Our next post will focus on the importance of creating multiple layers of security to best prevent successful cyberattacks.