Remember those guys a while back that demonstrated how they could hack a Jeep Cherokee, stealing control ranging from the mischievous (changing the radio volume) to the potentially deadly (killing the engine on the highway)? They are back in the news with the release of a survey of security professionals on IoT security perceptions.
IOActive, the company behind the Jeep hack says that you don’t have to take it from just them; about half of security professionals think that less than ten-percent of IoT devices on the market were designed with adequate security. 85-percent of those surveyed agreed that at least half of the growing market of IoT devices are not secure.
But the bar for IoT security is already pretty low. 63-percent of respondents think that IoT products are actually more secure than existing markets such as software, computing hardware and medical devices. The big concern is the sheer number of IoT devices expected in the near future will not only be easily exploitable, but also open up new vectors for attacks on deeper systems.
Uplogix & IoT Security
Uplogix can help insulate network infrastructure from outside risks by taking management out-of-route. For example, networking devices at an aggregation point can be configured to only accept management traffic from an Uplogix Local Manager over the console port. This “locks down” the device to potentially malicious outside traffic aimed at changing configurations, powering down or other unauthorized changes. It’s one way to implement IoT security today using proven technology.
Administrators are more efficient using Uplogix features like the ability to push mass config changes and upgrades without the risk that changes could result in network outages. Out-of-band
automated SurgicalRollback™ restores valid configurations instantly and automatically, allowing admins to focus on exceptions, rather than every site.
Uplogix lowers the cost and complexity of management by diagnosing and automatically fixing common problems throughout network infrastructure. In fact, Uplogix local management can address and resolve the bulk of issues that commonly impact distributed networks such as configuration errors, nonresponsive devices and telecom hardware failures. This is how you scale network infrastructure management to support billions of nodes.
We’re not saying it’s time to put an Uplogix Local Manager in every Jeep, but somewhere upstream in the infrastructure, it probably makes a lot of sense. For more information, check out the Uplogix Internet of Things Solution Brief.
