Of the millions of enterprise-Internet of Things transactions examined in a recent study, the vast majority were sent without benefit of encryption, leaving the data vulnerable to theft and tampering.
The research by cloud-based security provider Zscaler found that about 91.5 per cent of transactions by internet of things devices took place over plaintext, while 8.5 per cent were encrypted with SSL.
That means if attackers could intercept the unencrypted traffic, they’d be able to read it and possibly alter it, then deliver it as if it had not been changed.
Researchers looked through one month’s worth of enterprise traffic traversing Zscaler’s cloud seeking the digital footprints of IoT devices. It found and analysed 56 million IoT-device transactions over that time, and identified the type of devices, protocols they used, the servers they communicated with, how often communication went in and out and general IoT traffic patterns.
The team tried to find out which devices generate the most traffic and the threats they face. It discovered that 1,015 organisations had at least one IoT device.
The most common devices were set-top boxes (52 per cent), then smart TVs (17 per cent), wearables (eight per cent), data-collection terminals (eight per cent), printers (seven per cent), IP cameras and phones (five per cent) and medical devices (one per cent).
While they represented only eight per cent of the devices, data-collection terminals generated 80 per cent of the traffic.
The breakdown is that 18 per cent of the IoT devices use SSL to communicate all the time, and of the remaining 82 per cent, half used it part of the time and half never used it.
The study also found cases of plaintext HTTP being used to authenticate devices and to update software and firmware, as well as use of outdated crypto libraries and weak default credentials.
While IoT devices are common in enterprises, “many of the devices are employee owned, and this is just one of the reasons they are a security concern,” the report says. Without strict policies and enforcement, these devices represent potential vulnerabilities.
Another reason employee-owned IoT devices are a concern is that many businesses don’t consider them a threat because no data is stored on them. But if the data they gather is transmitted insecurely, it is at risk.
5 tips to protect enterprise IoT
Zscaler recommends these security precautions:
- Change default credentials to something more secure. As employees bring in devices, encourage them to use strong passwords and to keep their firmware current
- Isolate IoT devices on networks and restrict inbound and outbound network traffic
- Restrict access to IoT devices from external networks and block unnecessary ports from external access
- Apply regular security and firmware updates to IoT devices, and secure network traffic
- Deploy tools to gain visibility of shadow-IoT devices already inside the network so they can be protected