XGuard Monitor to secure of millions of devices

The IoT market is due to reach 31 billion connected devices this year, and by 2025 there will be roughly 75 billion IoT devices. Hackers have identified IoT devices as vulnerable to attacks. Attacks and vulnerabilities reported in the last six months reflect this rapidly growing trend:

• In October, the National Security Agency reported how edge devices were exploited by Chinese hackers.
• In November, a series of vulnerabilities were reported onTesla’s Powerwall, an energy storage gateway used in factories and residentials.
• In August, white hat hackers reported how they can violate the privacy of hundreds of millions of users of Amazon’s Alexa.
• In July, Iranian hackersexploited cellular gateways to make harmful modifications to Israel’s water sources.

The widespread attacks have resulted in customers and regulators requiring IoT device manufacturers to manage the security of their devices. However, the number of devices that are managed in fleets and arrays ranges from tens of thousands to millions of units. This creates scalability and cost issues for the IoT operator and the product manufacturer.

The sheer scale introduces significant white noise of alerts, which easily masks actual attacks. In addition, operating costs are disproportionately high, due to the number of analysts needed to sift through the massive number of events generated by a fleet’s IoT devices.

“As security teams accelerate efforts to secure IoT devices, they now need a unified way to manage those activities across their base of devices. With the experience we have gained protecting more than 12 million devices in all the leading industry sectors, we are in an ideal position to create a comprehensive and scalable management platform to solve this problem,” said Ami Dotan, Karamba Security CEO and Co-founder.

Karamba Security’s XGuard Monitor fills this gap and enables management of a large-scale number of IoT devices, with smart profiling of the device and the entire IoT fleet. It leverages XGuard agents that are seamlessly embedded into the IoT devices to automate security management and threat detection, as well as prevent attacks before they spread from one device to the entire fleet.

XGuard Monitor software constantly monitors the IoT device network and system parameters and reports suspicious device behavior to the XGuard Monitor analysis server, a consolidator, which aggregates and models the events. XGuard Monitor’s smart aggregation model reduces the number of events by 90%. It also reduces false alerts and data noise, which clutter security analysts’ views and increase the risk of cyber attacks being undetected.

Leveraging XGuard’s seamless integration, manufacturers embed XGM software into the device firmware during the software development and update processes. The agent provides deep visibility into device parameters. Such visibility enables fast and comprehensive incident research, including taking preventative measures on the device itself.

Karamba Security has joined forces with Micro Focus to combine their powerful analytics for intelligent prevention, detection and response capabilities with threat signals generated across the connected IoT device ecosystem.

“The ability to protect IoT devices while building a unique profile at scale across a product portfolio is a priority for the connected device industry,” said John Delk, General Manager and Senior Vice President, Security at Micro Focus. “This partnership with Karamba Security’s XGuard Monitor will deliver a leading solution that enables IoT devices to be automatically protected and monitored for previously unknown attacks resulting in a more resilient connected device ecosystem. Put simply, we are partnering for the future of cyber resilience.”

Industry standards, such as UN WP.29 for the automotive industry and IEC 62443 for smart building and smart factories, require manufacturers to manage their devices’ security. XGuard Monitor satisfies those requirements, at scale, without putting a cost burden on the management backend.

“Meeting the UNECE WP.29 new cyber security regulation is a critical task for automotive OEMs,” explained Paul Mascarenas, Chairman of FISITA and former Chief Technical Officer at Ford Motor Company. “The need to manage the fleet of vehicles, while ensuring their cyber security posture, is one of today’s top industry priorities. The regulators are looking to ensure a safe and smooth transition to a fleet of connected and autonomous vehicles. The XGuard Monitor solution is poised as an efficient and scalable way to meet this task, while combining active monitoring with a preventive approach to cyber security and maintaining consumers’ safety and trust in the evolution of mobility.”