Microsoft announces general availability of Azure Security Centre for IoT

IoT Azure security tool can identify configuration issues before they can be used in a cyber attack

Microsoft says that its Azure Security Centre for Internet of Things (IoT) is now available to protect customers' deployed IoT devices from various security threats.

"Azure Security Centre is the first IoT security service from a major cloud provider that enables organisations to prevent, detect, and help remediate potential attacks on all the different components that make up an IoT deployment," Michal Braverman-Blunmenstyk, Microsoft's CTO for Cloud and AI Security, claimed in a blog post.

Azure Security Centre has been generally available since 2016, enabling organisations around the world to protect their Azure cloud applications and Virtual Machines from cyber attack.

According to Braverman-Blunmenstyk, the Azure Security Centre for IoT is intended to protect end-to-end IoT deployment by timely detection of emerging threats, and responding to them before intrusion can occur. Microsoft claims that the tool can also identify issues in device configurations before they can be used by threat actors to attack the deployment.

Protecting IoT devices from attacks is a challenging task. IoT devices are heterogeneous, and organisations sometimes don't have the broad skillsets in-house required to deploy such devices in a secured manner.

Moreover, IoT deployments can't be easily monitored using traditional IT security tools, thus creating opportunities for errors, which can be exploited by the attackers.

Azure Security Centre for IoT will enable cloud customers to remediate attacks targeting the entire range of IoT devices, including small sensors, gateways, edge computing devices, and Azure IoT Hub. It will also be able to detect attacks on "the compute, storage, databases, and AI/ML workloads" that many organisations connect to their IoT deployments.

End-to-end protection of IoT deployments is important as attackers usually try to identify and target weak spots in a deployment. Just one weak configuration or admin account can enable attackers to enter an organisation's deployment.

Microsoft also advises organisations to keep an eye on any issue, misconfigurations and threats across all parts of their IoT solution, as well as the admin accounts, and to take appropriate steps in case some unusual activity is noticed.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was launching two new cloud-based technologies intended to help cyber defenders react faster and to manage their security efforts during cyber-attacks.

The company said that its new security solutions, named Azure Sentinel and Threat Experts, would empower security teams by lessening the amount of noise, time consuming tasks, false alarms, and complexity that weigh down cybersecurity personnel in various organisations.