Major Corporations Form IoT Cybersecurity Alliance

The IoT is getting a little more secure thanks to a new IoT Cybersecurity Alliance formed by IBM, Nokia, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and Trustonic. They’ll work together to help find solutions for today’s top IoT security challenges and raise awareness of how to better secure the IoT ecosystem.

In a survey last year, AT&T reported 3,198 percent increase in attackers looking for vulnerabilities to exploit in IoT devices. Approximately 58 percent of survey respondents said they were not comfortable with the security of their devices.

“The explosive growth in the number of IoT devices is only expected to continue; therefore, so must the associated cybersecurity protections,” said Mo Katibeh, AT&T senior vice president of advanced solutions. “Today’s businesses are connecting devices ranging from robots on factory floors to pacemakers and refrigerators. Helping these organizations stay protected requires innovation across the whole IoT ecosystem to enable sustainable growth.”

The Alliance members say protection at the endpoint, network, cloud and application layer is key to good IoT security. They also believe in the use of threat analytics and in designing products with built-in and “always on” security. They plan to both advise consumers and educate manufacturers and developers on what they need to do to create a safer, more secure IoT ecosystem. They said they plan to collaborate with top cybersecurity and IoT experts.

The goals of the IoT Cybersecurity Alliance include:

• Collaboration and research on security challenges of IoT across verticals
• Dissecting and solving for IoT security problems
• Making security easy to access
• Influencing security policy and standards

The alliance members are market leaders in data, cloud, applications, connectivity and device security and will work together to create and ensure end-to-end IoT security.

Related:

Cybersecurity archives

Could we finally have a secure IoT, courtesy of the NSA?