- So what is the Internet of things,
and why is that important
for corporate networks?
Find out today on Cyber Sentinel.
(pulsating music)
(music drowns out spoken words)
So welcome to Cyber Sentinel,
this is Alan Adcock.
I'm CEO of ASC Group.
And we appreciate you sending questions in
over social media to #cybersentinel.
We're gonna get to a couple
of those questions here today.
- [Narrator] What is the fundamental data
that I need to have prepared
before I talk to an IT consultant?
- So we continue to go
out and meet with small
to mid-size businesses on a regular basis,
and one of the fundamental
pieces of information
that they don't normally
have at their disposal
is just a true inventory
of what's plugged into their networks.
Anytime that we've got devices
plugged into a network,
we need to have a full
inventory of those, so we know
who owns them and make sure
that they're getting updated
and maintained on a regular basis.
Oftentimes, we can solve
a company's problems
using tools that they've already got.
They just don't know that they have them,
or they don't know fully how
to implement those features.
An inventory really helps
us to figure that out
on the front end of those engagements.
Recently, we talked to a
company that was having issues
with restricting some access
to data on their network
and were looking to us
for a solution to that.
We were able to actually
restrict that data
and solve that business problem
without having to purchase
any additional tools,
just by using information and tools
that we found were already deployed.
- [Narrator] I see IOT in the news a lot.
What does it stand for and what is it?
- So, IOT stands for Internet of things.
It's a buzzword, marketing buzzword,
in the information technology
industry these days.
Really what Internet of things refers to
is all the connected devices
that have been coming out
on the market recently.
And we're talking about
that on Cyber Sentinel
because there are security implications
to all these little devices.
A good example of IOT devices
are all your video cameras
for security applications.
Even refrigerators and
coffeemakers and doorbells
and thermostats, all those
things in your house.
Your house is probably full of this stuff.
All these devices connect to the network
and, because the development timelines
for these are really short,
everybody's trying to get
into that market very quickly,
a lot of these don't have
good security protocols
in place on these devices.
And we're finding that these
devices can be leveraged
by hackers to form a
foothold into a network.
In the home, this is pretty prevalent.
It's not as big an impact maybe
'cause of the type of data
that you have at your house,
but in a corporate network
we really want to get controls
around these kinds of devices.
So, when we look for these
on a network, we want to see
how can we segment these devices
off of the corporate data
and make sure that, if
they are compromised,
the impact of that compromise is lowered.
In the home there's not a lot
you can do to defend yourself.
Most people do not know
how to upgrade the
firmware and the software
in their smart television
or their refrigerator.
But these are the kind of things
we have to worry about
on a corporate network,
and making sure that those IOT devices
are segmented in a way
and protected in a way
that they're not gonna impact the data
that's on the network.
We had a company recently
that contacted us.
They were having major performance issues.
They thought their ISP was
not delivering the bandwidth
that they were paying for.
It turned out that, when we
went in and looked at them,
their bandwidth was completely being used
because one of their IOT
devices had been compromised,
and unknown actors were using that device
to share out files across the Internet.
Once we put some controls
around that device
and got it cleaned up,
their bandwidth was restored to normal,
and they were able to continue
with the business operations.
So, we needed to pay
attention to those IOT devices
on the corporate network.
- [Narrator] What trends are you seeing
in the technology landscape?
- So some of the ASC staff
members recently went down
to Florida for the Fortinet
Accelerate 2019 conference.
This is a conference on cybersecurity
put on by one of our vendors, Fortinet,
that has a lot of products
in that security space.
There's several major themes
that came out of that conference.
IOT came out of that
conference, and the impact
of IOT devices that are showing
up on corporate networks.
Most of these devices in a
corporate setting are an issue
because nobody really owns those.
Once they're on the network,
if it's a workstation
or a server or an application,
there are departments that own them.
These are sitting in between departments,
and so we're trying to
get our hands around,
corporate security-wise, how
to handle those IOT devices.
Another major theme coming
out of that conference was,
in the security space we used to focus on
finding the best of breed product
for whatever security item
that you're looking for.
Like we're gonna try to find
the best of breed antivirus.
We're gonna put that in.
Best of breed firewall, et cetera.
And, nowadays, we're looking
more and more at solutions
that all integrate together,
trying to fill the gaps
between those solutions.
So, rather than focusing just purely
on a best of breed solution,
we want stuff that's gonna talk
to each other and
coordinate effort in order
to help us to address a lot
of these security threats
that are emerging on the networks today.
And the third trend that
we saw at the conference
was a lot of discussion on how do we deal
with the massive amounts of data
that are now being collected
off of corporate networks
by security tools.
So, we're adding what's called telemetry
to corporate networks, which
means we're collecting data
about how that network
performs and using that data
to identify threats that
are on that network.
So, as we're queuing all this data
through the various sensors
that we're able to deploy now,
just sifting through that massive data
is becoming a big data problem.
So, a lot of trends in
the industry are around
how do we use AI and other advanced tools
to sort through that data,
and really bring people's
attention to the pieces of data
that are really important
that they need to look at,
so that those things don't get lost
in the noise of that network.
So, from a trend standpoint,
those are three of the things
that we took out of that conference.
And there's all tools
that are being developed
to help us to address those trends.
So this is Alan Adcock.
I'm with Cyber Sentinel, and
we appreciate your questions.
If you have any questions
that you'd like to have us
address in a future episode,
please find us on social
media at #cybersentinel.
