What Security Impacts Do Mobile Devices Have On Your Business?
Mobile computing is on the rise. Smaller, faster, easier – in many ways, this approach epitomises much of how we have come to regard technology in general over the past decade. The mobile phone or PDA is no longer an exclusive white collar toy, and the processing power of 4.3inches of touch-screen in our sweaty little palms already rivals that of the enormous super-computers of yesteryear. If you’re an Australian employer, chances are that well over half of your workforce arrives and leaves work with some sort of mobile computing device on their person. AVG (AU/NZ) poses the question – has confidence in our new personal computing power brought with it complacency at the same time?
We think it has. Alarmingly, AVG’s own SMB Market Landscape report found that almost three quarters of small to medium sized businesses do NOT agree that the use of mobile phones in business represents a threat to IT security. Take into account IT analysts Forrester’s finding that mobile development is a top initiative for nearly all enterprises, and you have a fertile breeding ground for a new family of SMB security threats. More than 50% of enterprises are most interested in using mobile applications or mobile optimised web sites to reach out to their customers – so why do we choose to ignore the obvious threat?
Don’t be Naive!
Cyber criminals aren’t stupid. They operate on the same risk/reward basis as the rest of us, and they tend to go for the low hanging fruit first. Those pesky Mac OS X users who flaunt their preferred operating system as more secure than Windows are wrong – there is a greater volume of malware threats aimed at machines running Windows because Microsoft dominates the marketplace. We invite all users to watch threats written for systems such as Mac OS X and Linux continue to rise in proportion to their share of the desktop/laptop landscape (with a good Mac linkscanning solution such as AVG LinkScanner®, of course).
The same paradigm holds true for the mobile device boom. According to fresh data from Gartner, smartphone sales to end users in the third quarter of 2011 are up a whopping 42% on the third quarter of 2011. Devices using the open source Android™ operating system claimed the lion share, with over 60 million units sold equating to 52.5% of the smartphone market.
So it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that it’s unlikely to take long for mobile malware to go Industrial. If mobile devices provide a route to users’ personal information, intellectual property and business data, and if the device is powerful and connective enough to afford access to this data, then malware developers will be continue to be drawn to them in greater numbers.
Manage the Risk
The first thing you can do as a business owner or IT professional is be aware of the problem and plan your mobile device strategy accordingly. Here are some things you can start working on immediately:
Ensure all devices with access to your network are password protected
This includes access to your Wi-Fi network, work email and business data (client, supplier, internal etc). Enforce this as a company policy – this is not plug and play computing!
Ensure all devices with access to your network are fully patched and up to date
If a mobile device has access to your network, you should treat it like a PC – if it’s out of date, it’s insecure. Ensure that smartphones used to access your data are not “jailbroken” or “rooted” – kernel manipulation of the device can circumvent the unit’s security settings.
Mandate wherever possible the use of a good mobile security system
AVG can help – AVG Mobilation is widely used and trusted by small business and individuals within the Android™ community.
Put together a mobile device policy document
Spell out your security requirements and permissible mobile usage to your employees. Once again, we can help – our AVG Online Security Audit is designed to assist you with this process. The audit will ask how employees use company and personal equipment and produce a personalised report, identifying where problems lie and recommending actions.
Are we placing some sort of blind faith in mobile computing devices today? AVG suggests strongly that the answer to this question is yes. Whether this is because we still think of smartphones as “phones” or status symbols rather than computers, whether it is because we still consider the traditional desktop PC as the most likely place to see a virus, or whether it is because we simply haven’t stopped to think about it yet – the reality is that mobile threats are here, they are real and they can be extremely damaging.
At this risk of sounding like a road safety traffic accident commercial, please don’t become yet another statistic. Help us wake up our collective business and consumer consciousness to this issue today.
Related Posts:
- What Security Impacts Do Mobile Devices Have On Your Business?
- SMBs can no longer rely on the King Canute approach to mobile security
- Keeping your Mobile Workforce Secure
