IoT & Liability: How Organizations Can Hold Themselves Accountable

Effective asset and vulnerability management: You must be able to identify each device as well as its current status and state, including all the applications residing on each device. Both actively and passively scanning devices allows you to have a much better picture of the current state of your infrastructure.

Monitoring applications: It's essential that you have a way to monitor the health of your applications and can respond immediately at the sign of an incident. Is your endpoint antivirus client still functioning? Has it been tampered with or uninstalled? Being able to see something (or someone) meddling with your endpoint applications can be a telltale sign of malware infection or attack, or a malicious insider attempting to do "bad things."

Monitoring traffic: Keep an eye on traffic, applications, and devices for unauthorized connections to cloud services. While not always a sign of malicious or nefarious behavior, this can be an indication of "bad things" happening. This kind of monitoring can alert you that a device has been subverted and is being used to exfiltrate sensitive data — or worse, an employee who is exfiltrating the information themselves. This will allow your security teams to react in minutes instead of days or weeks after the damage has spread beyond the single device.

Employee monitoring: It can be tough to convince employees that this level of monitoring is required, but the consequences of an incident can be catastrophic. A good baseline is a commitment that monitoring is only done by automated tools, and never viewed by an actual person unless absolutely necessary or in an emergency. Let your employees know that the monitoring is strictly for the protection of your assets, your data, and your customer information. It takes only one inappropriate incident by your trusted security staff to destroy the fragile trust of your staff, and it may take years for it to be earned again.

Effective log management: Your log data at all levels often contains a wealth of useful information that can add color and clarity to your current security posture. If you're not currently using a modern solution to collect, scrub, analyze, and respond to anomalous log events, then start small. Focus on building solutions that target your most critical assets: devices belonging to C-suite executives and their assistants, your privileged accounts and devices belonging to administrators, and various system accounts that often have rarely changed credentials.