5 Critical IoT Security Challenges and How to Overcome Them

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to reshape industries, from healthcare and manufacturing to energy and higher education. They’re smartwatches on a runner’s wrist, pacemakers regulating a heart, video doorbells securing a home, and even connected machinery used in manufacturing. The number and variety of these devices are expected to increase. Today, there are nearly 20 billion IoT devices connected worldwide – a figure projected to exceed 40 billion by 2034. (Source: IoT Analytics / Statista). 

These devices present a golden opportunity for threat actors. Every new device connected to a network expands the number of possible entry points for a cybercriminal. Connected equipment like HVAC systems and even fish tanks can be used as the initial entry point in an attack chain if organizations aren’t careful. With an average of 820,000 IoT attacks occurring daily in 2025 – and IoT malware surging 124% year-over-year – it’s never been more urgent for security teams to address IoT security challenges head-on.

Understanding the most pressing IoT security challenges is the first step toward building a resilient defense. This blog will cover a few of the most common challenges that organizations face when securing their IoT devices.

IoT Security Challenge 1: Lack of Visibility

One of the most significant IoT security challenges lies in device discovery. In simple terms, it’s impossible for organizations to secure what they can’t see. This is true with any network-accessible hardware or software asset, of course. With IoT devices, the scale of usage makes the issue particularly acute.

Organizations need to use technologies like port scanning, protocol analysis, and other detection solutions to figure out what devices are connecting to corporate networks. There are many products designed to help organizations discover the IoT devices connected to networks and build an inventory of assets for tracking. 

The second component of resolving the discovery challenge is continuous management. One-time scanning only builds a point-in-time inventory. New devices come online all the time, meaning organizations need to manage their device inventory to ensure that they have an accurate picture of every IoT device attached to their network at all times. 

Resolving the shadow IT problem is perhaps the biggest value-add for device inventory. Connected printers, surveillance cameras, and smart TVs are some of the unexpected IoT devices within corporate networks that could easily go unprotected. Shadow IoT is now one of the fastest-growing enterprise security risks, with organizations reporting that unmanaged devices regularly appear on networks without IT’s knowledge. With a device discovery solution in place, organizations can discover internet-facing devices like these and include them in an asset inventory. A solution like Asimily’s IoT Device Discovery and Inventory Management is critical in this context. Continuously scanning the network to discover new devices as they come online allows organizations to make more informed decisions about their security. Asimily identifies devices safely based on their network traffic. With the industry’s best protocol analyzer, deep packet inspection (DPI), and AI/ML-based traffic analysis, Asimily finds and classifies each device into a family, along with all apps, services, and connections.

IoT Security Challenge 2: Access Control and Authorization

Access control and authorization are key challenges with IoT devices that grow more complex as these devices proliferate. Every IoT device has a unique identifier that it shares on the network. Determining what each device can talk to and which level of authorization it can have within your network is critical to long-term IoT security. 

Too much network access creates the possibility of using the IoT device as an initial access point for further lateral movement in an attack chain. That’s what happened in 2017, when a Las Vegas casino was hacked because of a thermometer in the lobby fish tank. Security firm Darktrace released the report shortly after it happened, explaining how hackers gained access to the fish tank thermometer and then moved to the PC that monitored the temperature in the tank. From that PC, hackers were able to attempt to make off with casino data.

Strict management of network authorizations and access with IoT devices can short-circuit attack chains. Authorization isn’t the same as network segmentation, but rather provisioning devices with only the access they need to be efficiently monitored or perform their required functions. Implementing a zero-trust approach – where no device is implicitly trusted – helps organizations enforce least-privilege access across every connected endpoint.

Similarly, organizations need to monitor who has access to their IoT devices. If the connected device is transmitting data back to a supplier, or that supplier can remotely access the device, then organizations need to monitor these communications safely to address this IoT security challenge. Third-party access to IoT devices is an overlooked dimension of this IoT security challenge, and one that requires continuous oversight.

IoT Security Challenge 3: Vulnerability Management and Patching

Patching vulnerabilities is a cybersecurity best practice across all cyber assets – but is a unique IoT security challenge. IoT devices present unique problems with patch management, especially because many come pre-installed with outdated operating systems, firmware, and communication technology. This IoT security challenge is especially acute in healthcare, where 83% of medical imaging devices run on unsupported operating systems.

The often-dispersed nature of IoT devices makes patch management far more difficult. IoT sensors may be spread throughout miles of farmland, for example, or there could be connected pacemakers in dozens of cardiology patients. Critical-use IoT devices like medical equipment also can’t easily be taken offline long enough to deploy a patch. 

Many IoT devices don’t have a user interface for technicians to interact with, complicating the deployment of a patch even more. There’s also no guarantee that the IoT device will accept an update or that an update won’t irreparably damage operations. If a vendor stops supporting a connected device, that causes even more issues with vulnerability management. Weak or default credentials compound the problem: many IoT devices ship with factory-set passwords that attackers can crack in seconds, yet organizations rarely change them post-deployment.

Organizations with heavy IoT usage should perform a risk assessment on every connected device that connects with their network, including discovering any outstanding vulnerabilities and determining remediation strategies. 

A major reason patching is so difficult is that every IoT vendor handles firmware updates differently. Most require downloading a binary file and uploading it to the device using proprietary management software – a manual, time-consuming process that doesn’t scale across diverse device fleets. Some devices, like networked switches or clustered systems, have additional requirements around maintaining failover states during upgrades. The result: organizations leave devices unpatched for months, with Asimily research showing an average of five months between firmware releases across tested devices.

Asimily’s IoT Patching capability directly addresses this IoT security challenge by normalizing the firmware update process across manufacturers. Rather than managing a different patching workflow for every vendor, security teams get a single, consistent interface. Asimily researches manufacturer-specific update methodologies and automatically deploys targeted security updates –with options for single-device, scheduled, bulk, or fully automatic patching. The platform also includes IoT Password Management, which centralizes credential storage, eliminates default and reused passwords, and ensures patches can be deployed on your preferred schedule without manual credential lookups. By monitoring for new patches and deploying them without agents, Asimily shortens the exposure window between when a vulnerability is disclosed and when it’s remediated.

Knowing where to focus the cybersecurity team’s attention is crucial. Asimily’s unique Impact, Likelihood, and Utilization analyses show which vulnerabilities attackers are likely to target, allowing them to allocate resources to the riskiest devices first. To also help with this, Asimily provides SBOM harvesting for prioritized lists and remediation recommendations.  SBOMs are used to help with exploitability analysis – to separate risky exploitable vulnerabilities from less risky, unexploitable vulnerabilities for a given device and network configuration.

IoT Security Challenge 4: Detecting Attacks in Progress

Every IoT product behaves differently with distinct protocols and communication methods. Understanding the way the IoT product interacts with the rest of the network, as well as what protocols it uses and how it behaves normally, is crucial to accurately monitoring the device for cyberthreats. 

Detecting threats is easier when security teams have a better sense of what the expected behavior of an IoT device is and how it interacts with the rest of the network. This also allows for better risk assessment. Knowing the way that an IoT device communicates and what it is expected to do empowers security teams to more effectively identify anomalous behavior. With better detection, organizations can more readily identify attacks in progress. The scale of automated scanning makes this IoT security challenge increasingly difficult: threat researchers reported a 16.7% worldwide rise in active scanning in 2025, with adversaries deploying bots that probe for open ports, default passwords, and unpatched firmware around the clock.

AI-powered attacks are adding another layer of complexity. Threat actors now use machine learning to automate vulnerability discovery and adapt intrusion techniques in real time, making traditional signature-based detection less effective.

IoT security requires a solution like Asimily with its anomalous behavior detection, which allows defenders to quickly identify when a device isn’t acting normally. This allows cybersecurity teams to more readily determine when an attack is occurring and then deploy incident response capabilities. 

IoT Security Challenge 5: Responding to Attacks Effectively

Incident response presents unique challenges in securing IoT. Tracing a security alert back to the specific IoT device that triggered it requires purpose-built tooling that lets responders investigate quickly.

Resolving incidents quickly and effectively limits the potential spread of damage. Dispersed IoT device networks with sometimes geographically separate devices complicate this, especially if these devices are not readily accessible remotely. More effectively responding to high-risk vulnerabilities and prioritizing response based on a dynamic, real-time threat analysis is required. This includes remediation blueprints for removing the greatest risk from the identified device groups, as well as automatically performing packet capture to reveal the tactics, techniques, and procedures that malicious actors are using.

The financial stakes reinforce why this IoT security challenge matters: the average IoT security incident costs $330,000, while healthcare IoMT breaches can exceed $10 million. Organizations that invest in network segmentation reduce breach costs by an estimated 35%, making proactive response planning a measurable ROI decision.

How to Address IoT Security Challenges in 2026 and Beyond

Overcoming IoT security challenges requires a layered approach that combines visibility, access control, vulnerability management, threat detection, and incident response into a single, unified strategy. Organizations that address these five IoT security challenges holistically — rather than in silos — are better positioned to reduce risk across their entire connected device ecosystem.

Key steps to strengthen your IoT security posture include:

• Deploying continuous device discovery to eliminate shadow IoT and maintain accurate asset inventories.
• Enforcing zero trust access policies so every device operates under least-privilege principles.
• Prioritizing vulnerability remediation by risk using exploitability analysis and SBOM-driven intelligence.
• Investing in behavior-based anomaly detection to catch threats that signature-based tools miss.
• Building incident response playbooks tailored to IoT environments, including packet capture and automated containment.

Securing the billions of IoT devices coming online over the next several years is one of the defining cybersecurity challenges of our time. Between outdated communication technologies, shadow IT installations, and issues with understanding device behavior, it’s easy to see the challenge facing security teams. Despite this, organizations don’t have to go it alone. Asimily’s IoT security solution helps healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, higher ed, government, and other organizations protect and understand their connected devices now and in the future.

Want to see how Asimily helps organizations overcome IoT security challenges? Request a demo to learn more.