Unmanaged Devices: 6 Reasons You Should Care If They’re on Your Network
Medical and IoT devices regularly connect to the same network as your other devices. Unfortunately, they often receive much less attention than your computers, tablets, and phones, leaving a significant gap in an organization's security. Consider these six reasons you should care about medical device security and especially unmanaged devices on your corporate network.
Problems with Unmanaged Devices
1. Unmanaged devices will not receive necessary patches
Many developers push out updates and patches regularly. When a zero-day exploit is discovered, teams typically act fast to close the hole. However, if you do not manage your medical and IoT devices, you may not receive those patches as quickly as needed.
When an attacker finds a new exploit, they often post the vulnerability for others to use. If you do not manage your devices and patch the problems, you may have a serious open vulnerability that can expose your organization to attacks.
2. Unmanaged devices do not receive regular scans and attention
Your malware scanners evaluate your network and many of its primary devices regularly. Unfortunately, the vast majority of networks have unmanaged devices on them. Those devices may not receive the same scans and attention as the devices that you usually manage. Attackers can find their way into those devices, and without scans in place, they may go unnoticed for a lengthy period.
3. Unmanaged devices are hard to monitor
Do your employees connect IoT devices to your network regularly? Even if you carefully monitor network traffic, you may not know what is happening on those devices. You may struggle to understand what is typical for that device and what is out of the ordinary. An employee could be sending out sensitive information, on purpose or unknowingly, without proper monitoring of unmanaged devices.
4. Employees can engage in risky behavior on unmanaged devices
Employees often engage in more dangerous behavior on IoT devices than on their primary devices. They may connect personal devices to whatever network they approach, especially if they need to use those devices regularly. As a result, they may open themselves up to malware without realizing it and then bring it back to your network.
5. Unmanaged devices can get out of control quickly
If you allow open access and permit employees to connect any device they like to your network, it can quickly get out of control. Network performance can drop as unmanaged devices consume bandwidth, and it becomes much harder to identify where a threat originated or what device caused a problem.
6. Unmanaged medical devices compromise privacy
Medical devices may contain confidential, private information. Placing those devices on the company network can create significant privacy problems and expose the organization to HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, or other regulatory violations. Breaches can leak sensitive patient, customer, or personally identifiable information and are often more impactful, expensive, and resource intensive than maintaining compliance in the first place.
Get Control of Your Unmanaged Devices with IoT Secure
Managing IoT and medical devices is crucial to an organization's overall security. Visibility across unmanaged devices is the first step because you cannot secure what you do not know.
IoT Secure simplifies IoT security and management, segmentation, micro-segmentation, and protection. IoT Secure devices run on any network port with no SPAN ports or software agents to install.
- Connect the IoT Secure IoT-mini security appliance anywhere on the network.
- Get an automated Threat Check report that provides details on IoT devices and vulnerabilities on your network, including IoT-specific threats that traditional vulnerability scanners commonly miss.
You can test the results at home, with a virtual network, or directly on your work network with zero measurable impact on performance, availability, or bandwidth.