Unapproved IoT devices

New thermostats and building sensors often have multiple data radios. Wi-Fi is the one you know about, but is your sensor also transmitting on other frequencies like ZigBee (short range) or LoRa (up to 1 mile range)? What data is beaming down the street that you don’t know about? To learn more about discovering the unapproved Internet of Things devices using cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other RF-protocols in your environment read our Bastille data sheets or request a Bastille demo.

Key Takeaways

• Compact, battery-powered IoT emitters can transmit data at low rates over very long distances
• They use their own protocols, completely bypassing Wi-Fi infrastructure
• One can be hidden covertly to collect and relay intelligence from far outside a facility
• Visibility into these transmissions is the only way to tell authorized IoT devices from malicious ones

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO] Hello. My name is Balint Seeber. And I'm the director of Vulnerability Research at Bastille. I'd like to talk to you about unapproved IoT emitters, that is, Internet of Things radio enabled devices that can broadcast on a variety of different protocols. Here's an example of an IoT transmitter. This is quite compact in form. It can run off a battery. And it contains a microprocessor, as well as a radio front end that uses a new and upcoming IoT protocol.

What's special about this is that it can actually transmit information at a low rate, but a very, very long distance. So if you wanted to connect this to some other device to surveil the environment or collect information about an element that you were trying to discover more intelligence on within an organization, you could deploy one of these in a covert and compact form factor, and be quite far from the physical device, and attempt to receive this data.

This completely bypasses any sort of Wi-Fi infrastructure that you have as it uses its own unique protocol. So being able to have visibility into these sorts of transmissions is key to actually discovering the presence and usage of these devices, whether they are intended and authorized, such as in existing deployments of IoT devices, or if they're being used in this sort of nefarious or malicious context. Thanks very much for listening. If you'd like to learn more, please visit our website. [MUSIC PLAYING] PLAYING]