Fortinet Expands Cybersecurity to IoT Devices through the Security Fabric

Fortinet has recently unveiled it Security Fabric, a threat protection architecture which expands upon the scale of security to reach IoT and remote devices like routers and printers used by a company. The growth in threat attacks on mobile phones and IoT devices has prompted Fortinet to create this expansive and adaptive security platform for clients who wants to have a stronger protection for their data.

We interviewed Derek Manky, Fortinet’s Global Security Strategist, to discuss more about the Security Fabric, as well as IoT and mobile threat reports and predictions that implicates the need for security protection in these devices.

Derek Manky: We currently have a team of 200 security experts worldwide that are constantly developing new technologies because there is always new threats that we need to accommodate and prevent, we’re seeing a very sophisticated threat surrounding Android phones, threats that we haven’t really seen before. Cyber criminals are putting a lot of effort into trying to evade detection from security vendors, so that’s why it’s important for our team to continuously follow the trends in threats. SO we are currently focusing on mobile threats and IoT, so the span of our security reaches into a wider spectrum.

Tech News: So what specifically are these threats on Android phones?

Manky: So for the first time last year, we saw mobile-based ransomware, it’s based of the past ransomware models but it now moved into the Android platform. So that was the most significant threat that we saw for mobile devices, in terms of volume, the threat has a 661% growth from Q1 2015 – Q1 2016. Ransomware relies on monetization, so there have been a lot of these kinds of threats for mobile phones.

TechNews: So how is the threat protection going to move forward based on those statistics?

Manky: According to our threat prediction for 2016, we’re going to see an unprecedented amount of traffic, and we’re probably going to see the first large-scale phone infection, because we’re already seeing the numbers increasing on phones, so there are these Trojan droppers that act like a botnet that infect a phone that connects through a communication channel. I expect that the Android and OS security threats will just continue to increase over the years, because right now threats are becoming much more resilient.

Tech News: So is it now harder to develop threat protection for smartphones and handheld devices than in laptops or computers?

Manky: Definitely. It’s not just hard for mobile phones to create threat protection, but also for IoT devices. If you look at IoT, we are going to have about 20 billion connected IoT devices by 2020, and that’s quite a lot 4 years from now. IoT is led by phones, so we have various versions of Android, and also other platforms from BlackBerry and Apple, so now we also have these other IoT devices that we’ve already detected to have infections, we have worms and viruses on routers, on security cameras, printers, and other IoT devices. Do we have an anti-virus for a printer?

Not yet. So I believe that we need an IoT based security protection in order to protect these IoT devices who are now still vulnerable to threats and attacks. (CA Garcia)