This article originally appeared on IAPP.org, the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
“No matter what happens, don’t panic,” were the words used by hackers just before they hacked a 2014 Jeep Cherokee. It wasn’t your typical hack, where credit card information is stolen, or a denial of service attack is propagated, or a website is taken down. This incident involved disabling the transmission and brakes of a vehicle driving 70 mph. In other words, this is the kind of hack that could take someone’s life.
Car hacks make juicy headlines, but dating back as far as 2007, we saw researchers demonstrate how a generator could be destroyed. In 2014, hackers broke into a German steel mill and prevented a blast furnace from being shut down. As recent as last year, Norse and the SANS Institute released a study revealing 375 U.S. health care organizations were actively compromised between September 2012 and October 2013.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently pointed out, the old security paradigm “felt that human beings were the problem and tech is the solution.” What the internet of things pushes forward is a reversal on the old paradigm that humans are the solution to the problem that technology creates.
If we look closer at the human supply chain and data security for IoT, there are three key players: manufacturers, developers and end users.
Here’s how they can advance the future with foresight (rather than the proverbial hindsight):
1) Manufacturers
We are finding that many manufacturers can engineer connected parts but do not have the security staff or experience to protect the features. Automotive and medical device companies release embedded systems with no one on staff to respond to a vulnerability report.
The product cycle typically looks like this: The manufacturers have a limited budget, as with all product releases, their primary goal is user adoption – not security. As the researchers and hackers find security flaws, user adoption is increasing, and the manufacturer has to release a patch or issue a recall. By this time, cybercriminals have an open opportunity to exploit the embedded system or flawed IoT gateway.
Original equipment manufacturers should focus on security from the product design stage, which will involve additional in-house security professionals or dedicated partners. With an average of 25 vulnerabilities per device, interconnectivity demands rigorous protection. One approach to improve the R&D cycle is to generate more revenue from the IoT device in order to invest early in more security checkpoints. One medical device company saw 10 to 20 times the revenue when opting to give a device away for free and charge monthly, moving from charging for IoT products to IoT services. This move helps incentivize the manufacturer to keep the device or embedded system on the market.
Also, to lump all manufacturers together would be a mistake. Many large software companies who have always handled security well will continue to do so – no matter the number of connections or level of proliferation. Apple tends to be a front runner on how they handle security, however, manufacturers can learn to lean more on legacy-level security companies to help test, iterate or secure, post-production, the connections and systems they release. “Leave it to the experts” is as true now as ever.
