For anyone worried about defending against the rise of internet of things botnets powered by malware such as Mirai, and related distributed denial-of-service attacks, don't start with technology.

"I think the first thing to know is, if you get attacked, have a relationship with your upstream providers," says Cameron Camp, a security researcher at IT security firm ESET North America.

While that might sound obvious to frontline IT defenders, he says, it's too often not obvious to senior managers, who need to encourage and help the organization's IT team cultivate the type of peer-to-peer relationships that will enable it to quickly mitigate related attacks, especially in this era of massive DDoS disruptions.

In an audio interview at RSA Conference 2017, Camp discusses:

Best practices for responding to DDoS attacks; The societal penchant to rarely throw away old IoT devices; The imperative for IoT device makers to find a way to remotely push patches.

Camp has been a security researcher for ESET for more than 10 years. Prior to that, he was research lab manager for advanced optical communications systems manufacturer Opticomm Corp.