“What about security?” is the burning question as the Internet of Things starts to transform entire industries. There is so much for all to lose and gain that even competitors are putting their heads together for the greater good.

At the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, where more than 40,000 attendees meet to hear the latest on information security, Jason Porter (pictured), vice president of security solutions at AT&T Inc., spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. The discussed the IoT Cybersecurity Alliance launched earlier this month as well as the state of cybersecurity.

“We formed an alliance with some big names out there, like Palo Alto Networks, IBM, Trustonic and others,” Porter said. “IBM and AT&T are two of the largest managed security companies on the planet, so you would think competition,” Porter said. He said that solving IoT’s security problem is so pressing right now that companies can’t afford not to work together. “It’s the number one barrier or concern for adopting IoT,” he said.

Porter should know. AT&T carries massive traffic through its network. “We pull in 5 billion threat events every 10 minutes,” he said. An increasing number of those are coming from IoT devices.

Autonomous cars raise IoT security stakes

Porter spoke about AT&T’s stake in the icon of IoT, the self-driving car, through the use of 5G. He said that with the safety of individuals at risk, they are throwing everything they can at securing networks in autonomous vehicles.

“We’ve even got some specialized solutions that we built with some three-letter agencies to really monitor that control point,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s on-the-ground coverage of the RSA Conference 2017.

Photo by SiliconANGLE