Intelligent automation best way to protect firms from cyberattacks: Venafi study

Intelligent automation is the best way firms can protect themselves from cyberattacks, said a study, adding that real-time monitoring of every machine identity can also thwart threats.

As organisations increasingly rely on servers and other physical devices to store corporate data, a much more secure and reliable machine authentication is needed to protect machine-to-machine communication in businesses, said the study conducted by cybersecurity company Venafi in a report of Digital Journal.

The study, which focuses on the threats posed by cyberattacks, proposes action for businesses to safeguard their systems.

The study suggests creating, installing, assessing and ensuring the integrity of communications between machines.

The research report titled ‘The Machine Identity Crisis: How the explosion of machines is affecting the security of machine-to-machine communications’, points out the growing dependence on machines and mobile devices. It says that mobile data traffic is expected to increase seven times between 2016 and 2021, with 16 billion devices coming into use by 2020.

The report looks at various vulnerabilities that need attention.

IoT vulnerabilities

Internet of Things (IoT) devices send massive amounts of data to a central location as they can’t store up lots of data themselves, owing to limitations.

This transmission of commercially sensitive data, if not secured, can pose risks. So the challenge is to secure transmission of data between IoT devices, the Internet and enterprise networks. 

Mobile communication vulnerabilities

Mobile devices, enterprise networks and the Internet transmit a lot of data among themselves, and the businesses find it difficult to authorise secure communications by identifying and authenticating each mobile device. Businesses find it challenging because few have the tools to do this.

Cloud vulnerabilities

New measures to encrypt data and secure machine identities can help businesses with security and privacy on cloud.