Introducing IoT Patching from Asimily: Your Key to Scaling Risk Mitigation

The complexity of patching IoT devices is why we’re proud to announce IoT Patching, the newest feature from Asimily. With Asimily’s IoT Patching, users can patch supported IoT firmware with confidence and reduce the risk of an attack, all within the Asimily platform. 

The rise of IoT-specific vulnerabilities and more attacks like the Matrix botnet in 2024 makes it imperative to simplify and accelerate applying firmware patches to affected devices. Doing so is the only way to ensure that security teams close down potential avenues of compromise and reduce the risk of an attack succeeding. Patching, however, has been historically cumbersome for organizations.

How Asimily’s IoT Patching Helps Mitigate Risk

The Asimily platform has long been purpose-built for connected device security. It builds and maintains the asset inventory required to understand the scale of IoT devices connected to the network, while also monitoring device behavior and network traffic to watch for potential compromises. Today, Asimily’s new patch management release adds yet another layer to IoT security within the Asimily platform, simplifying the process of applying fixes and ensuring that companies are more resilient. 

With IoT Patching, Asimily’s goal is to streamline the process of patching connected devices and ensure that teams know about patches when they are released. 

The key functionality of the new Asimily IoT Patching solution includes: 

• Fast updates about new patches: Asimily monitors for patches in all relevant IoT manufacturer repositories, ensuring that teams are aware as new fixes are released. Asimily IoT patch testing includes trying to brick test our lab devices, so our customers won’t.
• Unified patching process: Using the Asimily platform to deploy firmware means customers don’t need to understand or master the different mechanisms to install a patch. This reduces the complexity of patching, ensuring that companies can deploy the patches they find regardless of device vendor. 
• Scanning to find eligible devices: Asimily monitors network traffic and can build inventories about the entire IoT architecture. With the new patch management solution, all devices eligible for an upgrade can be easily found and the install success rate and status easily checked. 
• Simplified deployment model for all patches: No more command lines – deploy patches, and see their status and history all from an intuitive interface for any supported device. This resolves a huge potential issue with IoT devices and can make it possible to patch faster. 
• Intelligence into available firmware versions: With Asimily, customers can see available firmware versions including which one the company is using, to better balance availability and security. This can be important for teams who need to review patches prior to deployment. 

Asimily also empowers teams with functionality to enhance the patching process in IoT. These capabilities include: 

• Bulk Patching: Multiple devices can be grouped to receive patches together. This can save a substantial amount of time on patching devices, ensuring that all relevant systems are patched whenever the security team is ready to deploy the code. 
• Scheduled Patching: Asimily empowers teams to schedule when to deploy patches in IoT devices. The ability to patch at a predetermined time and date can dramatically minimize operational disruption, and ensure that users have updated systems while still being able to complete their work. 
• Automated Patching: Teams can automate patching with Asimily, allowing new firmware availability to trigger the patching process immediately. This enables teams to stay ahead of attackers and reduce risk. 
• Constantly Growing Device Support: Asimily continually adds new manufacturers and device models to its patching database based on customers’ needs, future-proofing additional purchases. As a result, customers can get access to more patches for more devices. 

Why Asimily’s IoT Patching is the Key to Comprehensive IoT Security 

Patching Internet of Things (IoT) devices has long stymied even the most effective cybersecurity team. The issue is twofold: patches are not often available and it’s often complicated to apply fixes to connected devices. It’s exceedingly common for IoT devices to lack interfaces that make it easy to apply patches even when there are fixes available for identified vulnerabilities. 

Where the interface exists and it’s possible to patch the device, manufacturers may still complicate the situation with different ways to apply firmware fixes. Each device may require a careful trip to the manufacturer’s website and documentation to learn their unique way of applying an IoT patch. This added complexity to the process of resolving firmware vulnerabilities means it’s difficult to apply patches reliably across IoT devices. 

Yet patches are released regularly for IoT devices such as IP cameras, printers, switches, and many more. Deploying these patches proves a necessary part of maintaining a secure IoT infrastructure.

Patch Management for the Modern Organization

IoT patch management can be very complex for the average organization. To be fully patched, users must assume each IoT device will not function during the patch process. They don’t typically have enough processing power or memory to continue operating during updates. Doing so may not always be feasible, especially if the device is critical to the organization. Because of this limitation, security teams may be limited in terms of when they can deploy the needed patch. Regardless, downtime typically has to be scheduled to have the least impact on the business possible. 

Moreover, each device manufacturer can use a different method for applying firmware updates. This most commonly involves downloading a binary file and uploading it to the IoT device in a specific firmware update mode. The process often means using proprietary management software for each manufacturer. Credentials could – and good cybersecurity would say should – be unique to each device.

In some cases, as with networking devices, there are often special requirements to maintain cluster failover or other special states. These also have to be taken into consideration during the IoT patching process. 

Between the direct challenges of patching the device itself as well as understanding who has released patches and when – managing the process is time-consuming and complicated for even the most skilled cybersecurity professional and team. At this second, imagine all the IoT devices in your organization – what process is in place to see if a patch was released last night from the manufacturer?  Who would have caught that and orchestrated the patch while keeping uptime in mind?  

There needs to be an easier way to manage the process and ensure that patches are applied to IoT devices. And now, there is.

Resolve the Risks with Asimily 

Patching IoT vulnerabilities is one of the most important things security teams can do to reduce the risk of a breach occurring because of a connected device. Given the reality that IoT devices are regularly at risk of being compromised, organizations need to find an easy way to patch vulnerabilities and reduce that possibility. 

With Asimily, security teams can more effectively manage the process of patch management for IoT devices through the power of centralized management, monitoring for new firmware fixes, and scheduling capabilities to reduce downtime. Asimily customers can be confident that they have the right tool on their side to manage IoT patching and mitigate the risk of a damaging cyberattack. 

To learn more about Asimily and the IoT patch management functionality, reach out now to book a demo.