A version of the below excerpted article originally appeared in Security Now.
With an estimated 30 billion connected devices and a market valued at 14.4 trillion, the service provider industry continues to go BIG – with no signs of going home.
While the market size and number of connected devices may be large, IoT security strategies must account for a small number of misbehaving devices. Threat actors use cheap, large-scale technologies to blanket a large number of networked devices and locate vulnerable targets. They need only to infect a small portion of devices or network elements, however, to launch a successful attack.
As noted by Terry Young, senior manager of Service Provider Product Marketing at Palo Alto Networks, research suggests that an infected population of as little as 0.01 percent can create a signaling storm, resulting in serious congestion.
So, how can service providers discover and address the small number of infected devices out of the billions connected to their networks?
According to Terry, the answer is network-based prevention, which allows service providers to see and inspect their traffic for infected devices. By focusing on the minor percentage of traffic that is malicious, service providers can offer subscribers and IoT providers a network safe from breaches.
Read the rest of Terry Young’s article at Security Now.