The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA, recently released a paper on Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT) security.
The 34-page report is titled, “Considerations for Managing Internet of Things Cybersecurity one Privacy Risks.” From defining basic and critical security issues it also touches upon topics like device access and management, and the difference between the security capabilities of IT hardware and IoT systems.
The report is the first in a planned series of documents NIST is developing to help IoT users protect themselves, their data and their networks from potential compromise.
As all of know, the IoT is rapidly evolving, and is a bundle of diverse technologies that interact with the physical world. Many organisations, says the NIST, are not necessarily aware of the large number of IoT devices they are already using and how IoT devices may affect cybersecurity and privacy risks differently than conventional information technology (IT) devices do.
The purpose of this publication “is to help federal agencies and other organisations better understand and manage the cybersecurity and privacy risks associated with their individual IoT devices throughout the devices’ lifecycles.”
The NIST, founded in 1901, is now a part of the US Department of Commerce. It is one of the nation’s oldest physical science laboratories.
In a post on its official blog, Mike Fagan, a NIST computer scientist and one of the authors of the report, writes, “The report is mainly for any organisation that is thinking about security on the level of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. “It’s targeted at the mode of thinking that an organization would have — more resources, more people, more ability, but also more risk of attack because of all those things. It’s bad when a single house is attacked, but if a million bank account passwords are stolen, that has a much larger impact.”
Click here to download the paper.
Image Credit: NIST/Twitter