22 Mar Webroot talks about Data, Cloud, and IoT Security
With the data and security circus that is the RSA Security Conference heading out of San Francisco, we sat down for one more time, this time with John Sirianni – Vice President of Strategic Partners, IoT – for Webroot.
So John, how has Webroot approached this new world of IoT from a security point of view?
Sirianni: So our focus for the IoT markets is to focus on the critical infrastructure providers, those are OEMs and operators that are looking for a way to protect their installations from various threats. We are leading into (this) market with threat intelligence, so as we have had success in the past with OEM security appliance manufacturers, we are bringing threat intelligence to the providers of IoT gateways. So that would be OEMs and manufacturers that are bringing gateways to market to protect their systems.
And that seems to be a topic at RSA, this shift from threat analysis to prediction?
Siriani: Yes, so our history is one of autonomous behavior tracking to understand where the threats are coming from. So being in that industry, we are taking that autonomous assessment of behavior to the IoT. We believe that is the only way you can actually defend, to be up to the current understanding of where threats are emanating from.
So these threats are now coming from billions of IoT nodes…how do you keep up with that?
Sirianni: You have to keep up with the parts of the market that care about it. So, we have seen demonstrated at certain parts of consumer IoT, they really don’t care about whether their devices are secure. And we see that the critical infrastructure – power and energy management, integrated transportation – those are filled with manufacturers and operators that care about their infrastructure and are willing to work with leading security companies to monitor and provide situational awareness to all the activities. You can’t protect it all.
We have seen this before, where the corporate IT departments hid their eyes from personal devices and phones being connected to corporate networks…