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Internet-connected devices (also known as “the internet of things”) are a key business enabler for modern enterprises focused on transforming their businesses and gaining competitive advantage through automation and intelligent decision-making. According to IDC, there will be over 55.7 billion connected IoT devices (or “things”) by 2025, generating almost 80B zettabytes (ZB) of data.
While this underlines the enormous opportunity presented by IoT, the effective security for connected devices hasn’t kept pace with their increasing adoption. While more than 1.5 billion IoT breaches occurred in the first half of 2021, a remarkable 136% increase from the previous six months, the breaches are expected to increase in the coming years with the growth in total number of deployed IoT devices.
During the pandemic, many IoT and IT devices were left behind in corporate environments when employees transitioned to remote work. Management oversight and lack of security updates have made these devices highly susceptible to targeted cyberattacks. With hybrid work now normal, employees are expected to bring a diverse set of corporate and personal devices for use in their jobs. The Netskope Device Intelligence engineering team collected and analyzed the number of connected devices at a representative customer site within a fixed time period in 2021 (“Before”) and 2022 (“Now”). As evident from the graphs below, there has been a huge surge in the number of unmanaged devices within the representative customer site in 2022, as compared to 2021. These devices will further interact with the IoT devices in the corporate networks, creating a significantly larger attack surface to manage and control.
Threat actors keep finding new ways to infiltrate connected devices every day, and the trend will continue t