According to the publication recently made by Revistabyte.es, Palo Alto Networks has presented its "Second Annual IoT Security Report" at a virtual press breakfast, which reflects that 97% of large Spanish companies that have connected IoT devices , consider that their IoT security requires improvement.

The report shows that difficult-to-protect IoT devices are increasingly connected to corporate networks by remote workers, creating new opportunities for hackers to infiltrate organizations.

“According to the available data, Spain is one of the European countries that invests the most in IoT and it is a trend that will continue to grow. Reducing operating costs or improving the customer experience is a trend that will continue to grow ”, explains Tony Hadzima, Country Manager of Palo Alto Networks in Spain.

Security incidents

86% of companies, who have IoT devices connected to their organization's network, consider that they have sufficient visibility of the IoT devices of remote workers connected to their network, despite this, almost a third (26%) reveals that they do not have any type of segmentation in their networks to control these types of devices. Therefore, it is not surprising that 77% of respondents consider that the switch to remote work during the pandemic has increased the number of IoT security incidents. 26% of large Spanish companies do not segment their IoT devices from their network

Annual Report on Security in IoT

Attempts to attack large organizations because of IoT devices are being repeated more and more. These range from a simple intrusion into home devices, to general security breaches. More than half of respondents (51%) who have IoT devices connected to their company network say they are most concerned about advances in industrial IoT devices, followed by breaches in surveillance cameras (49 %) and distributed denial of service (DaaS) attacks (44%). Finally, the study data also shows that 64% of respondents believe that many improvements need to be made in their organization's approach to IoT security.

In this sense, Spanish organizations highlight that the three most necessary capacities for a good IoT security strategy are:

threat protection (61%)
device inventory and visibility (54%)
risk assessment (52%)