Cyber criminals and cybersecurity professionals have been at war for many years; battles are hard fought, damages have been significant, and there is no quick end to what is clearly a prolonged conflict. One advantage that cyber criminals have on their side is the accumulated remediation deficit that has built up within organizations. There are over 170,000 known vulnerabilities that are tracked by NIST in the national vulnerability database; 58% of them with either critical or high severity. Thankfully, many of them can be remediated using traditional IT cybersecurity solutions for password, patch, and certificate management. But what about those IoT systems where traditional solutions don’t apply? Roughly half of known vulnerabilities can be exploited on IoT devices. That’s where the stage is set for significant damage from cyber criminals from distributed and unmanaged IoT systems.
