The Internet of Things plays an important role in today’s life, affecting a plenty of businesses and changing the way we work, live, and entertain. Coming up with workflow automation, remote equipment monitoring, inventory tracking, and real-time data collection, IoT promises to bring innovation in various industries.

Understanding high IoT potential, companies and corporations invest in IoT projects, startups, and initiatives. According to New IDC Spending Guide, the worldwide IoT spending is predicted to reach nearly $1.4 trillion in 2021. What’s more, Gartner research expects the number of IoT-enabled devices will be about 21 billion by 2020.

Though IoT provides many advantages and opportunities, there remain IoT security risks and challenges, that now are of the highest concern. Since today almost everything can be hacked, businesses have to look for and integrate new security mechanisms allowing to ensure data and device protection.

The main IoT security risks

1. Data Leaks

Smart devices collect and transmit various data that may involve such important information as credit card numbers, zip codes, customer locations, camera images, IP addresses, and much more. A leakage of private/personal/business/financial data can lead a company to money and reputation losses, and harm people’s lives.

2. User verification

Misconfiguration and default passwords use are common reasons for the appearance of device/data vulnerabilities. That’s why engineers should implement the ability for customers to create their own passwords while establishing the highest level of password reliability that all users have to follow.

3. Lack of regulations

Unfortunately, there are often no regulations for IoT devices. The creation of a standards-based approach to security should be a top-priority task for companies, organizations, and even governments.

4. Unknown surveillance

Often unprotected IoT devices can be accessed by any remote user or at least can be easily hacked. The consequences can be poor: for instance, streaming and selling private videos and images (including those from stores, shopping centers, etc.).

IoT security recommendations

1. Focus on data traffic monitoring. Imagine a cloud IoT solution, that monitors both inbound and outbound traffic, traces all suspicious activities, blocks unsafe communications, instantly alerts users and the central system about potential problems, and prevents data leaks.

2. Implement end-to-end encryption in your application, the most reliable way to protect user data. Famous mobile messengers WhatsApp and Viber added the support of e2e encryption long ago. If your project implies many data/user communications, you can use this approach too.

3. Use reliable tools that help ensure data confidentiality and privacy as well as build a secure and scalable data storage. Integrate a feature of suspicious activity and malicious code monitoring. For example, today we can see an increasing use of AI technology for real-time security monitoring.

4. Focus on testing activities. When developing an IoT solution, pay a lot of attention to the testing/QA process. It’s much better to prevent any security issues at the pre-release stage than waste time for bug fixing after.

5. Integrate a Blockchain decentralized approach. Since Blockchain is based on cryptographic algorithms, it helps protect and manage data. Blockchain has all transactions (interactions) recorded, so the history of smart devices will be also recorded. At the moment, the use of Blockchain for securing the Internet of Things is one of the emerging and most promising trends.

As you see, there are really good ways to minimize IoT security vulnerabilities. Here I should note that one of the best recommendations for developing a successful IoT project is to apply to a reliable IT company that would focus on security and data privacy issues. Also, when choosing the company, pay attention whether it meets the GDPR requirements, which will be especially important from the regulation enforcement on May 25, 2018.