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Development ServicesIn the past decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown from an upcoming technology few took seriously to an absolute technological phenomenon changing businesses across continents and industries.
However, as more and more companies integrate IoT devices into their infrastructures, concerns around the security of IoT networks become more prevalent.
Along with increased productivity and functionality comes a network vulnerability problem. The more connected devices you have in your ecosystem, the more potential gateways the hackers have to infiltrate your system for their malicious purposes.
As the Internet of Things develops and becomes more prominent every following year, we must understand the main threats to IoT development. If you plan to adopt this new tech in your enterprise or already did, you might also be interested in securing your IoT ecosystem and making it more resilient.
This blog will walk throught some essential IoT market and security statistics to see where it is all going and how you can make your environment safer by adopting relevant security strategies.
Security is a Major Concern
By the end of 2022, 32% of the companies that have already adopted IoT consider data security issues related to the lack of skilled personnel to be the most critical concern for their connected ecosystems.
A third of those companies believe attacks on devices are the primary concern. For all the advantages of IoT and the potential financial benefits it provides, the sheer number of connected devices in the hands of different people in different locations makes the system vulnerable.
Lack of security awareness among the personnel is a critical issue, and some of your employees might need to secure all their connected devices properly.
By 2025, there will be up to 40 billion connected devices all over the planet. And the number of IoT devices will grow within your business as well.
This trend means that you will have to invest in the security of your IoT ecosystem as soon as you can. Unfortunately, the more devices you have, the more vulnerable your enterprise becomes, as it is nearly impossible to control all the interactions between your employees and machines.
The obvious solution here is to promote security awareness among the employees and reinforce the security of your edge nodes. It all comes down to training your employees on how to use the devices correctly and securely and implementing the relevant security measures such as identity verification procedures, physical protection of the devices, abnormality detection, encrypted data transfers, network-based firewalls, and more.
Using strong passwords, keeping an eye on the devices at all times, being careful with the Wi-Fi networks they log into, and all that basic stuff is essential for keeping your data safe. Your employees must understand the value of the data they access and the outcomes of losing it. Your safety begins with simple rules and basic security requirements.
With the ever-growing amount of data and the number of devices, hackers have more and more ways to breach your security, access sensitive data, and even steal your assets. This situation should not happen, and as necessary as reliable security solutions are, your efforts might go sideways just because your employees need to be more careful. For that reason, you need to focus on forming a corporate culture in which your employees treat the security of the corporate assets with all seriousness.
IoT Security Market Keeps Growing
The IoT security market is projected to grow to 38.7 billion in 2023 compared to 34.2 billion in 2022. It all correlates with the growing number of connected devices needing severe protection. As a result, security firmware will prove more important than ever in the following decade, which is why such IoT device security statistics are not surprising.
The following chart shows the past and projected growth of the IoT security market:
The current state of the IoT security market is rather remarkable, with 15.8 billion worldwide, and it shows no sign of slowing down. By 2025, the market size is expected almost to double, making it a safe bet to invest in IoT security now.
IoT Cyber Attacks Escalate in 2021
When we say cyberattacks are a threat to IoT devices, we mean it. From January to June 2021, there have been more than 1.5 billion IoT breaches, most of them using the telnet remote access protocol. The Internet of Things hacking statistics is rising due to the pandemic and the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Again, the pandemic has become a critical factor in the increased cyberattacks on devices due to the prolonged use of said devices within a household environment. Many devices used at home lack adequate security protocols, making them easy prey for hackers. Nearly 58% of the attacks occurred with the intent of mining cryptocurrency.
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One of the main reasons why hackers succeed with their attacks is people’s carelessness. Most people think they are not important enough to be targeted by hackers, though they might be viable targets for cybercriminals. Especially considering how easy it is for someone to breach their security.
That leads to a critical vulnerability of enterprises with employees working in household settings. As a business owner, you must ensure your employees follow all the security protocols at home. They might not even go as far as to use a secure Wi-Fi connection, which puts your data in a precarious position.
House-sitting is one of many problems, though. Hackers can easily breach your enterprise firewalls, too, if you are not using proper security protocols. In addition, attacking the edge nodes of your IoT ecosystem is the most straightforward way to extract valuable data or steal your assets. Therefore, you would want to avoid giving your edge nodes access to core data centers.
As IoT attack statistics are on the rise, proportional to the growth in the total number of devices, it is possible to assume that the number of attacks will only grow. What we can do, though, is reduce the number of successful attacks.
This can be achieved by applying relevant cybersecurity techniques such as network-based firewalls, limited connectivity profiles, abnormal activity detection, and other appropriate solutions.
Smart Homes and Legislation
As one of the most vulnerable settings, your home might be a target of malicious attacks, which is a genuine concern both for the users of smart home devices and the developers of said devices.
According to this year’s investigation, an average smart home could be a target of more than 12,000 hacker attacks in a single week. This number is just staggering if you think about all the vulnerabilities of modern smart homes.
Anything, from a thermostat or a coffee machine to your autonomous vehicle, can be targeted by hackers. That is rather alarming news for anyone using smart devices in their daily lives and anyone selling them.
It is worth mentioning that the fast growth of the market and subsequent growth of the cybercrime stats raise some eyebrows in legislative circles. For instance, the UK now requires the makers of all smart devices to offer more transparency around their security measures. This means that the customers could select devices based on their security characteristics.
The new laws enforce improved security in intelligent devices, ultimately leading to the development of devices with much better protection from malware. This is good news for the customers as they would be able to select devices with the best protection, putting pressure on companies that neglect proper security measures.
The laws now specify the number of criteria the devices must meet before the market launch, so if you sell any smart devices in a country with similar laws, you must meet those requirements.
Some new security criteria for smart devices include a ban on simple default passwords. As a result, the sellers would not be able to set up simple passwords like “user” or “12345”; instead, they will have to use much stronger passwords as many users don’t change the default passwords. These and other criteria are essential for creating secure-by-design devices that guarantee trouble-free usage. Of course, that would not deter all the hackers, but it will reduce the number of successful attacks on your smart home.
A legislative effort to regulate the security precautions taken by the developers of IoT devices is excellent as it normalizes secure-by-design devices and, consequently, makes it harder for hackers to steal the users’ data.
Financial Services, IoT, and Security
Financial services companies are all about keeping their data and assets safe, so they rely on a whole network of security measures. This includes usual precautions such as surveillance cameras in their offices and security devices used by the employees. All of this is a part of the IoT ecosystem.
Financial services companies lead the way in adopting IoT, with up to 58% of companies already using it to some degree. Additionally, financial service companies are well ahead of other sectors in adopting visual identification technologies, with 51% of fintech companies already implementing visual identification powered by AI and analytics systems.
The adoption of IoT in financial services is inevitable as it opens vast opportunities for companies in the sector by expanding the connectivity of their networks. But, at the same time, it opens a whole bunch of new pathways for hackers to breach those networks, gain access to sensitive data, and steal money from people.
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The main problem is that scammers and hackers can breach the users’ devices, which puts their assets under immediate threat. Of course, the regular users’ devices would not have access to the financial services’ core data, so the company itself risks nothing, but the vulnerability of the end nodes of the IoT ecosystem is the problem that needs solving as soon as possible.
The Amount of Data Grows
With an ever-growing number of connected devices, it is only logical to assume that the amount of data they generate would grow too. The amount of shared data is expected to reach 73.1 zettabytes by 2025. For comparison, the connected devices currently generate some 17.3 zettabytes of data, and one zettabyte equals one billion terabytes.
That is a massive amount of data that needs to be protected. Of course, only some of that data can be protected; some do not even need protection. But there will be increasing attempts to access that loosely protected data from scammers and hackers. As a result, businesses across different verticals will have to focus heavily on securing that data and making the data centers impregnable to hackers.
Healthcare Organizations Adopt IoT
The Healthcare industry has been adopting IoT technology for several years now. The new technologies play a significant role in improving the outcomes of treatment and reducing costs.
At the same time, it puts the integrity of health records at risk. As the doctors fill their reports and keep the patient record on cloud storage, it becomes possible for the hackers to access that data and potentially use it for their malicious intentions.
With the widespread use of Electronic Health Records, the data concerning the condition of the patients is kept in digital storage, which makes it easier for doctors to operate that data more effectively. At the same time, this creates severe concerns regarding the safety of the doctors' data.
Even though healthcare organizations adopt new technologies relatively slowly, IoT is one technology clinical environments worldwide would benefit from. With the adoption of new tech, doctors and patients will have the chance to establish a closer connection with one another and cooperate in ways that were impossible before.
For instance, wearable health trackers might collect and transmit real-time information on the patient's health to the doctor, allowing the latter to understand better the dynamics of treatment and the patient's condition at any given moment. This data will surely improve chronic disease management and home care.
Additionally, doctors will be able to collect data from a much broader population and compare it to the data collected by other doctors. This tech would improve the quality of healthcare research, allowing doctors to understand treatment outcomes in different populations better.
Furthermore, it will speed up the data collection process and, subsequently, promote the rate at which innovations in the health tech sector occur.
Naturally, all that data needs adequate protection, and you can achieve that by using secure-by-design devices and protected data storage. That would allow the clinics to keep their patient data safe, which is essential for most people. Furthermore, nobody wants their health record to get spilled, so creating reliable data storage would be crucial for establishing trusty relationships between the clinics and the patients.
Wrapping Up
Look at all the IoT data statistics we have here. You might note how this technology is getting bigger and bigger every following year. And the stats show no sign of slowing down, so you can tell there will be many more connected devices in the next few years.
IoT usage statistics are on the rise, so it is the right time to invest in this new tech and take advantage of it. But, of course, to tap into all the benefits of IoT, you must ensure your ecosystem is safe and sound. You will need reliable and secure devices and firewalls on each level of your IoT ecosystem to get your enterprise functioning as intended without redundant risks.
