Research identifies IoT security concerns

By Katie Mills

The Internet of Things is in danger of becoming a denial of service (DoS) threat, according to a new report from Information service Neustar, which warns that security is the top concern among senior IT managers.

An explosion in data volumes will start to overwhelm their networks in 2016, many of the survey respondents told research company Quocrica, which compiled the report for Neustar.

The Many Guises of IoT report recognised that rapidly adding thousands of devices to a company network can automate processes and create a wealth of new opportunities. However these gains could be neutralised if the vigilance applied to normal IT devices is abandoned in the haste to ‘scale out’.

Responses from the 100 senior UK IT managers interviewed concentrated on four main categories of concern identified as Relevance, Range, Design and Security.

A significant minority of respondents questioned the relevance of the Internet of Things. While a very small number (3%) think that the IoT is overhyped, a larger minority say the IoT is already affecting their organization (37%) and more (45%) say that will soon.

The range of the effect of the IoT, categorised in the report under the heading Personal to Global, is a popular concern. As the IoT influences every aspect of the organisation, from the desktop to the data centre, taking in carpools, cities and company clouds, many senior IT managers wondered where their jurisdiction ends and who is taking responsibility for the management and security needed to support IoT at this scale.

In a related concern, the category of IoT Design is a major concern, according to the study group, of whom 66% want see the IoT become a series of hubs that interoperate with spokes on closed networks, which would make network configuration and security more manageable.

Security was the major concern among the study group, with the identity of things seen as the foundation to safe networking. Many (47%) are already scanning IoT devices for vulnerabilities, with another 29% planning to do so, with an almost unanimous verdict that DNS services will play the central role in securing the network.

“Businesses looking to deploy IoT should consider a decentralized security and management model, to reduce data volumes and relieve the considerable strain on networks,” said Jim Zerbe, Vice President of Product Management for Neustar.

The millions of ‘things’ on the Internet will eventually dwarf the number of traditional IT endpoints, according to Quocirca analyst Bob Tarzey. The business value derived from newly IoT-enabled applications must not be jeopardised by distributed denial of service attacks or floods of internal data, Tarzey said.