How risk management can help secure industrial IoT and big data
Read about approaches your company can take to manage IoT and big data cyber risks.
In 2018, Tesla cars were found to be vulnerable to wireless key fob breaches, and the Medtronic CareLink 2090, a medical device for monitoring and controlling pacemaker settings, was attacked and infected by malware. Both are examples of Internet of Things (IoT) getting compromised, exposing companies and users to physical and virtual harm.
“There are three major vectors of attack when it comes to big data,” said Joe Scotto, chief marketing officer for Indegy, which provides industrial cybersecurity solutions. “The first is an outside rogue attack, like blowing up a pipeline. This can have devastating effects on the economy.
The second is insider threats, such as an employee inadvertently doing something wrong that triggers a security breach, like using a laptop outside of a firewall and the laptop getting infected. The third is an employee knowingly doing something wrong to sabotage the company because he or she missed out on a promotion or is unhappy.”
These attacks are serious.
“An example [of cyberattacks] is a building that contains a data center for a financial services company,” said Michael Rothschild, Indegy’s director of product marketing. “There is a security breach, and the hacker compromises a sensor on a thermostat, turning up the temperature in the data center by ten degrees, and the data center fries.”
Given the expansive exposure to new cyberattacks on IoT and big data, are companies ready? Garrett Gross, an IT professional who works with security service providers, doesn’t think so. In an AT&T Cybersecurity blog, Gross talks about the danger of IoT and big data’s distributed network frameworks, where large processing jobs are spread across many systems to expedite processing and analytics.
“Distributed processing may mean less data processed by any one system, but it means a lot more systems where security issues can crop up,” said Gross.
Indegy’s Rothschild feels that cloud-based security and risk management might be the answer. “The cloud allows you to pool all of your data from multiple points,” said Rothschild.
