Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2019

47
Visibility and Anomaly Detection in The Age of Iot
By Craig Sanderson, Senior Director of Security Products at Infoblox
Historically, organizations have struggled to gain visibility of what users, devices and applications
are accessing their network infrastructure. If the maxim “you can’t protect what you can’t see”
holds true, then the prospect of the Internet of Things (IoT) business transition which will result
in billions of devices connecting to IP networks is a nightmare in waiting. Identification and
classification of IoT devices is particularly problematic because the range of new device types
leveraging the IP network is going to explode making it harder for IT security teams to manage
and control policies that protect these new devices from themselves and the existing IP connected
services.
Beyond controlling accessing and setting policy, IoT also presents a sizable headache when it
comes to detecting breaches and enabling effective response. The plethora of protocols that IoT
devices will leverage, spanning a broad range of vertical industries from Healthcare to Retail will
make it hard for traditional security platforms to detect breaches. Malware sandboxes whose
expertise is identifying abuse of well-known operating systems such as Windows servers will
have a steep learning curve to apply the same detection for the bespoke applications running on
proprietary software platforms. Instead organizations will have to rely heavily on secure IoT
endpoint platforms to try and reduce the potential attack surface area. Surely there must be a