A new group consisting of AT&T, IBM, Nokia, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and Trustonic have formed the IoT Cybersecurity Alliance with the aim of developing best practices to battle IoT security threats that have accelerated in the past year.
Consisting of security providers and IoT experts, the group will research and raise awareness of ways to better secure the IoT ecosystem.
The timing of this group could not be better.
As the number and diversity of connected devices multiply inside the home and business have risen, so have the security risks. AT&T itself said it has seen a 3,198% increase in attackers scanning for vulnerabilities in IoT devices over the past three years.
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As more businesses see their workers use their own devices to access company materials, businesses are seeing the potential threat IoT devices designed without security in mind might pose for their organization. Out of the companies AT&T surveyed in 2016, 58% said they were not confident in the security of their IoT devices.
Alliance members said the key factor in ensuring IoT security is to protect all devices at the endpoint, network, cloud and application layer, and using overarching threat analytics to study the overall ecosystem and designing products with a built-in, always-on security approach.
The IoT Cybersecurity Alliance set four main goals: collaborate and research security challenges of IoT across verticals; dissect and solve for IoT security problems; make security easy to access across the ecosystem; and influence security standards and policies.
While IoT offers various benefits and efficiencies to businesses, the alliance said that “security concerns often prevent businesses from adopting these emerging technologies.”
To overcome these issues, the IoT Cybersecurity Alliance members will help the industry maximize the advantages of IoT while educating about how to keep companies and consumers more secure.