Lastline Defender
for IoT

Total Internet of Things (IOT) Security

Lastline Defender™ safeguards your network from malicious activity related to IoT devices. The rapid growth of IoT in enterprise networks presents several security challenges, including:

• The lack of security in most IoT devices
• The large number of IoT vulnerabilities
• The number of IoT devices being connected to your network

The risk of malicious activity related to IoT is not something that may happen in the distant future – a recent Gartner study found that nearly 20 percent of organizations observed at least one IoT-based attack in the last three years.

IoT Security as an Afterthought

One of the primary reasons why IoT device security represents a significant challenge to keeping your enterprise network safe is the lack of security standards. There has been little agreement on a wide range of issues, such as identity and access management, encryption, network security, data privacy, and digital signatures.

In addition, many IoT device manufacturers fail to ensure the firmware running on their devices is free from vulnerabilities. Too many IoT devices also lack the ability to update their firmware, meaning that even if a vendor releases a new version of the firmware, you won’t be able to patch those devices.

IoT security is also a challenge due to the lack of computing resources for third-party agents, which is a result of the fact that they were not designed with that use case. This design approach prevents you from improving the security posture of an insecure device.

BYOD v2.0

Like our experience a decade ago with “BYOD,” IoT devices will likely disrupt your network security strategy. This disruption will come from several sources, in addition to the security challenges listed above. A primary source will be your employees, who may not follow a standard onboarding process for adding new devices to your network. The result will be unknown devices running unknown software, collecting and sharing unknown data, increasing the challenge of effective IoT security.

Securing Your IoT Devices

Lastline Defender gives you the ability to protect your network from IoT security challenges. It delivers the highest fidelity insights possible into threats entering or operating within your network, including compromised IoT devices.

We use a combination of three complementary techniques to deliver Internet of Things security and block both known and unknown attacks targeting IoT devices:

• First, we leverage our Global Threat Intelligence Network to scan traffic metadata and payloads for variants of known threats
• Second, we apply unsupervised AI to an organization’s network traffic to detect protocol and traffic anomalies
• Third, we use supervised AI to automatically create classifiers that recognize malicious network behaviors and previously unknown malware

Most AI-based network security products implement only the first two detection techniques. These probabilistic approaches lead to many false positives. Lastline Defender is different–it leverages AI that is automatically trained both on network traffic and malicious behaviors. This unique combination enables deterministic detections and eliminates false positives.

The traditional approach of relying on signature-based network detection does not work when applied to detecting compromised IoT devices. And, more importantly, just inspecting traffic crossing your perimeter will miss compromised devices that are communicating with other systems on your network.