Symantec has revealed it is securing more than one billion connected devices worldwide, protecting everything from cars, medical devices, industrial control systems, and countless consumer electronics from becoming hacked, tracked and electronically hijacked.
The new approach covers areas such as authentication, device security, analytics and management tools that will allow developers and manufacturers to stay on their guard at all times.
This includes the company’s Embedded Critical Systems Protection service, which locks down the software embedded in IoT devices to protect against zero-day attacks and other kinds of breaches.
“This is the next frontier. In the automotive industry, hackers can literally steer the car and ‘hit the brakes’ from their keyboards,”
“Symantec is partnering with manufacturers in the automotive, industrial control, and semiconductor industries, in addition to our work in healthcare and retail markets.”
The company is also working with manufacturers such as Texas Instruments and cryptography firms including wolfSSL to embed security at the hardware level. Symantec says that such partnerships will create new “Roots of Trust” that combine Symantec’s leading Certificate Authority with the partner’s embeddable technology.
Looking forward, Symantec also says that it will look to help enterprises of all types address IoT security through a range of new technologies, such as an specific portal for managing all IoT security needs via a single interface, and security analytics for proactively detecting anomalies that might indicate stealthy attacks on IoT networks.
Several companies have already warned about the potential security issues that the IoT will pose to the world around us.
Recently, a report from analyst firm IDC has predicted that 90 percent of all IT networks will have an IoT-based security breach within the next two years, although many will be considered “inconveniences” as they target non-crucial parts of the business.
This rise in attacks will see many chief information security officers (CISOs) forced to adopt new IoT policies to ensure their employees and their business remain secure when using a range of devices, the firm said.
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Attempting to secure the Internet of Things without focusing on the comically bad security vulnerabilities of IoT endpoints will end in frustration and ever-worsening hacks. IoT endpoint architecture must be re-thought -- perhaps by Symantec -- with security as an a priori design principle where common sense concepts like listen-before-talk and low level address masking are baked into the complete firmware stack of an endpoint. More on this here http://bit.ly/1WQYcXC