The IoT: Security and integration are key to success

Smart cities—monitoring for potential cyberattacks

Smart cities are dependent on sensors to provide them the data that serves as input to decision-making, whether automated or human-directed. If the network is compromised, the advantages of a smart city could quickly disappear. In one case, the telecommunications company that provided the infrastructure for sensors in a city in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region wanted an analysis of its ecosystem with respect to vulnerabilities.

SecuriThings, an Israeli company that provides a managed service for IoT security, began collecting data about the network and quickly identified malware running on multiple devices. “We saw multiple attempts to infect the devices and saw that the gateways were beginning to propagate the malware,” says Roy Dagan, founder and CEO of SecuriThings. The network had not been affected at that point, and the malware was removed.

SecuriThings evolved from a background in traditional cybersecurity. “We saw a need for this type of service in IoT,” Dagan explains. “Multiple entities are involved in this business—the telco that provides connectivity, vendors of IoT devices and technicians in the field, to name a few, and they are not necessarily experts in security. In addition, thousands of devices of different kinds are involved.”

SecuriThings’ methods for monitoring, detecting and ?mitigating IoT security problems include multiple levels of behavioral analytics. “We check each device against its own normal behavior,” Dagan explains, “and then look at clusters of devices to see how they are performing as a group, and finally we can compare among different clusters to see if there are anomalies.” Organizations can then initiate a response based on their policies, whether that is an internal alert, notification to an external stakeholder or blocking the action of the intrusion.