In-brief: The Internet of Things will make “datakinesis” – the impact of data attacks on the physical world – common, says Cisco’s Marc Blackmer.
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Valles del Silicio: How IoT is Democratizing Innovation
Here we find ourselves at the beginning of a new year, and I can’t resist looking ahead. As I observed in last month’s column, I’m an advocate for cyber security fundamentals. And, like any “fundamentalist,” I would like to assert that these security fundamentals won’t change. As for the Internet of Things as a whole, however, I believe that we are on the cusp of tremendous change. In the next year, I predict that many of the assumptions that have guided us in areas like networking, application development, data analysis and – yes – security will undergo major, and necessary, change. But to what? And from whom? That’s what I’d like to explore. This past December, I attended the inaugural weekend of CyberCamp, a three-day event in Madrid hosted by INCIBE and the Spanish government. In addition to having the honor of being one of the keynote speakers, I had the opportunity to speak with a […]
Cyber Security and IoT: Fundamentals Matter
I really struggled to come up with a clever analogy to start this post. In doing so I realized that this exercise was itself, the exact problem I was trying to describe. So much conversation about cyber security, especially cyber security for the Internet of Things (IoT), focuses on the sexy, the complicated, the one-in-a-million. In doing so, we ignore the most common threats and basic attacks. I would like to argue that if we are to effectively defend ourselves in this new IoT world, we cannot ignore the fundamentals of security. But let’s be honest: the basics are boring. I know that. Many of the practices that are most important are also the ones we’ve heard about before. As we look at them: there isn’t anything new there. That’s true – but I take that as proof that they are sound practices, worthy of keeping top-of-mind, rather than old knowledge that can be discarded. Here’s […]
IoT Security: The Next-Generation Matters Now
As a cyber security professional, I spend most of my days speaking with customers and colleagues about all of the nefarious ways “the bad guys” can wreak havoc and how we can best defend ourselves. The topics we discuss often include situational awareness, defense-in-depth, threat intelligence, and new cyber security paradigms we may find ourselves adopting as the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves. I would assert that these are extremely important topics to sort out. But there’s a very important element not being discussed: the question of who will sort them out. Simply put: what difference does it make if you have the world’s greatest technology if nobody in your organization knows what to do with it? Cisco estimates that there will be a deficit of one million skilled cyber security professionals over the next five years. By 2015, 90 percent of jobs in the developed world will require some set of […]
IoT Security – We’re Doing it Wrong
I spend a lot of time at information security industry events. It’s part of my job at Cisco -visiting customers and attending and speaking at conferences. And these days, many of my conversations are focused on issues surrounding securing the Internet of Things. By and large, I enjoy this immensely. But my experience also gives me a vantage point from which to observe the cyber security and IoT security community broadly. What I’ve concluded is this: ours is a community that is made up of highly gifted and intelligent professionals with diverse, but also specialized skills. Unfortunately, ours has been – and continues to be- an insular community. I’ve come to realize that this pronounced and endemic navel gazing does us and the general public a great disservice. In fact, it may make the job of not repeating the security mistakes of the last two decades more difficult. Can we […]
