Defend Your IoT with Device Hardening Tactics for a Secure 2025

From connected insulin pumps to smart TVs, Internet of Things (IoT) devices help organizations achieve their business goals. According to research, 51% of organizations using these connected devices planned to increase their IoT budgets in 2024. IoT devices enable organizations to collect data and leverage analytics models enabling nearly every vertical to improve service delivery. For healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs), smart devices help deliver patient medications and monitor conditions. Meanwhile, manufacturers improve their processes with outcomes like predictive maintenance, and municipalities engage in smart city initiatives to achieve sustainability goals. 

However, IoT devices come with inherent security weaknesses that attackers increasingly seek to exploit. According to research, IoT malware attacks rose 45% from 2023 to 2024, with a 12% increase in the number of attempts to deliver malware to IoT devices. To mitigate cybersecurity risks arising from these devices, organizations should engage in targeted attack prevention and device hardening. 

Understanding the Overlap Between IoT Device Hardening and Targeted Attacks

Often designed with minimal security considerations, IoT devices can provide attackers with unauthorized network access that enables them to steal data, disrupt operations, or gain control over critical systems. Malicious actors increasingly target these devices and their known security vulnerabilities. 

Many IoT devices fail to follow secure by design and default best practices, meaning they lack built-in security configurations. Organizations that purchase and deploy IoT devices must ensure that they implement secure configurations to mitigate risks. 

Typical configuration risks include:

• Default credentials: available publicly on the internet or easily guessable
• Lack of updates: limited operating system, software, and firmware updates related to identified vulnerabilities
• Limited visibility: difficulty identifying and monitoring all devices connected to networks
• Lack of authentication mechanisms: inability to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for device connections increasing credential theft or brute force attack risks
• Lack of encryption: limited processing capabilities leading to weak or non-existent data-at-rest encryption

Threat actors seeking to gain unauthorized access to networks recognize that these inherent security limitations make IoT devices an attractive entry point. 

Using Targeted Attack Prevention to Secure IoT 

As threat actors increasingly target IoT devices, organizations need to implement security mechanisms that mitigate risk. With targeted segmentation, organizations can create a focused security monitoring program. 

Targeted segmentation is a network segmentation technique that uses exploit vectors for grouping IoT devices. While organizations may have thousands of connected devices on their networks, the number of attack vectors is typically limited to the attack vectors, like those outlined in the MITRE ATT&CK framework. 

Targeted segmentation enables organizations to implement a targeted attack prevention program by augmenting their macro-segmentation architectures and reducing costs that micro-segmentation creates. With macro-segmentation, organizations divide the network into broad zones, often using firewalls or other network security technologies that define allowed and denied traffic. Micro-segmentation typically incorporates additional network technologies to help manage device-to-device and application-to-application communications. While combining these approaches improves security, they also increase costs. 

Targeted segmentation aggregates by device type and configuration risk profile. This enables the organization to implement security risk mitigations across multiple device types and manufacturers by applying remediations more precisely. For example, an organization may implement remediation tactics like blocking standard FTP ports for devices whose default configurations have these ports open even when the devices don’t need them to function. Meanwhile, devices that would need these ports to function would be on a separate network segment. 

By placing IoT devices with similar exploit vectors on the same network segment, organizations can create focused security monitoring and alerts that respond to these unique risks. 

Device Hardening Tactics & How Asimily Helps Achieve Them

Device hardening means implementing known secure configurations by disabling unnecessary functionalities and communications. 

With Asimily, organizations can implement robust IoT device life cycle management processes that mitigate cybersecurity risk and enable targeted attack prevention through network segmentation processes focused on shared security risk. 

Assess Risk During Procurement

The asset identification and protection process should begin before deploying a device to your environment. As part of your third-party risk management (TPRM) program, you should understand how a device impacts your current security posture. 

Asimily’s platform generates an organizational risk score that summarizes the overall device risk level. When purchasing new IoT devices, organizations can leverage Asimily to:

• Simulate device risk when deployed with default configurations
• Simulate impact on device risk when applying both theoretical and actionable recommendations
• Provide targeted remediation guidance that surfaces the simplest action with the greatest risk reduction capability

Implement Targeted Segmentation

To implement targeted segmentation, you need to know the devices connecting to your networks and their individual risk profiles. From there, you can aggregate devices that have similar risk profiles and exploit vectors together, creating a targeted approach to monitoring networks. 

With Asimily, you can streamline these activities and improve IoT device security with:

• Passive scanning that uses AI/ML network traffic pattern analysis and deep packet inspection to create and maintain a classified asset inventory
• IoT device classification and categorization without installing agents
• Identification, capture, and monitoring of operations systems, applications, firmware versions, and patch levels
• Customization to group devices beyond pre-determined sets 

Identify Known Good Configurations

When people say “good configurations,” they typically mean the changes to default configurations that minimize risk. For example, with most enterprise IT devices, organizations can use CIS Benchmarks to identify secure configurations. However, currently, no similar configuration benchmarks exist for IoT devices. Organizations need to review each manufacturer’s best practices and understand how their unique network architecture impacts the chosen configurations. 

When organizations use Asimily, they can streamline these processes and document decisions with the following capabilities:

• Detection of legacy operating systems no longer supported by the manufacturer
• Automated access control lists (ACLs) that limit incoming and outgoing communications
• Targeted remediation guidance to reduce risk, like blocking ports
• Capture a snapshot of the device’s “known good configuration,” including complete details about ports, services, external IP, topology, and more
• Ability to set automated rules and parameters for creating bulk and automation configuration snapshots for a large number of devices

Be Able to Spot Drift

Configuration drift occurs within an environment when a system deviates from the desired or documented state. Typically, drift arises from:

• Manual, undocumented changes 
• Applying security patches or other updates
• Troubleshooting a specific issue that has an unintended impact

Configuration drift can increase data breach, compliance, and operational risks. 

With Asimily’s platform, you can manage configuration drift with:

• Regular configuration drift checks
• Alerts that identify a device has drifted from the preferred configuration
• Ability to assign high/medium/low/non to different configuration categories, like differentiating between low-priority IP address changes and high-priority firmware version changes

Highlight Configuration Issues

Often, organizations struggle to identify configuration issues, especially in complex environments. For example, deploying a new device may impact the configurations of the pre-existing devices on a network segment. However, these changes often go unnoticed without appropriate documentation. 

Asimily’s platform enables you to use the snapshot of known good configurations to:

• Compare current configurations against approved ones
• Show configuration changes down to the parameter level
• Track additions and removal
• Review a timeline that assists in an investigation into the cause of configuration drift

Confirm Reversion to Safety

When organizations have hundreds or thousands of IoT devices, gaining visibility into each one’s configurations can be challenging. Not only do you need to know the current configurations, but you also need to know each device’s known good configurations. 

If you use the Asimily platform, you can easily restore a device to a known good state by:

• Retaining documentation of an approved good state for each device
• Comparing the current configuration against a previous one
• Using the documentation to restore the approved good configuration

Asimily: Enabling Targeted Attack Prevention and Managing Configuration Drift

Asimily is purpose-built to manage IoT devices so that organizations have visibility into and control over their fleets. Our platform provides context, taking into account vulnerabilities and the IT environment, so organizations can mitigate risk more effectively. 

Organizations efficiently identify high-risk vulnerabilities with our proprietary, patented algorithm that cross-references vast amounts of data from resources like EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System), Software Bills of Material (SBOMs), Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) lists, the MITRE ATT&CK Framework, and NIST Guidelines. It understands your unique environment, so our deep contextual recommendation engine can provide real-time, actionable remediation steps to reduce risk and save time.

To learn more about Asimily, download our IoT Device Security in 2024: The High Cost of Doing Nothing whitepaper or contact us today.