Security News > 2021 > July > Life in Lockdown: Offices Are Empty of People, Full of Risky IoT Devices
During lockdown, offices have been empty and quiet - but not dead. Networks have continued to run, and IoT devices have continued to operate unattended.
A study of more than 500 million IoT device transactions in little over two weeks between December 15 and December 31, 2020 discovered a 700% increase in IoT malware over a previous study of pre-lockdown 2019.
The volume and variety of IoT devices left running during lockdown is vast.
"Our team saw 76 percent of these devices still communicating on unencrypted plain text channels, meaning that a majority of IoT transactions pose great risk to the business."
Since many IoT devices are unmanaged, network traffic analysis is important.
"The only way to stop shadow IoT devices from posing a threat to corporate networks," say the researchers, "Is to eliminate implicit-trust policies and tightly control access to sensitive data using dynamic identity-based authentication - also known as zero trust."