Five million new IoT devices are being connected every day. By the year 2020, devices will be expected to reach 20.8 billion, according to a white paper from the Online Trust Alliance (OTA).
“One of the challenges of IoT is, it’s not just the safety and security of the device, and you and your data, it’s the safety and security impact to everyone else,” said Craig Spiezel, Executive Director and President of the OTA, in an exclusive interview with SecureWorld.
What is your role in securing IoT?
The past few months we’ve seen the biggest data breaches to date. From the Mirai botnet temporarily knocking the Internet infrastructure of Liberia down, to the massive Dyn server takedown, IoT security isn’t looking so great.
But what are we as security professionals and consumers supposed to do?
Watch below to hear Spiezel’s thoughts:
Where should the responsibilities in securing IoT devices lie? Should they rest on the consumer to regularly patch them and to check for excessive privacy settings? Should they rely on the manufacturers to create a product framework that checks for default password settings and firmware updates before they ship out? Or should they be in the hands of retailers to self-regulate what’s on their shelves based on security ratings?
And then there’s always more government regulation when everything else fails.
We all have a stake in IoT security, and we need to create a solution before something truly catastrophic happens. It’s one thing to have Netflix go down for a few hours; it’s another for an entire city to be without electricity or water.
