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Mobile security breaches in payments comes with a cost

Julie Campbell | November 20, 2013

Fraud is already rapidly on the rise in this sector which remains relatively limited, and it is only expected to grow.

When it comes to the adoption of smartphone based payments, one of the biggest concerns of consumers is mobile security, and for good reason, according to the latest data that has revealed that fraud in this area is a growing trend and it is coming at a considerable price.

The m-payments market was slow to get started, but it is experiencing some growth.

However, at the same time that m-payments are slowly growing, mobile security risks are increasing rapidly and are expected by experts to increase at a more rapid pace in coming years. This problem is expanded when m-commerce is taken into account, as shopping over smartphones has been taking off at a very rapid rate and is expected to become quite explosive over the upcoming holiday buying season.

A recent report has shown that the cost that mobile security issues is going to be a pricy one.

Mobile security breaches come with cost According to the Gartner technology research group’s projections, over the next four years, m-payments will experience a 35 percent average annual growth rate, which will send the number of users to around 450 million, and the amount of spending over this method up to $721 billion by 2017. In North America, alone, there is expected to be a growth rate of 53 percent, this year, so that by the end of 2013, it will have reached $37 billion, when compared to last year’s $24 billion. This is positive news for that industry, but also represents a growing mobile security risk as it becomes a more lucrative target to potential scammers and thieves.

All of the major players in smartphones and technology seem to have made their way into m-payments in one way or another, each with their own efforts to enhance mobile security to the point that they can make consumers comfortable with the tech and keep out fraud at the same time. This includes the acquisition of Braintree by PayPal, the new and improved mobile wallet launch by Google, and the addition of fingerprint scanning and biometrics by Apple.

Still, the primary barrier that all of those companies face is in mobile security, as consumers are still not convinced of the safety of their sensitive data. As many consumers are already quite comfortable with the payments methods that they already use, they are not ready to take a risk on a new and little known technology, when they don’t feel that their credit and debit cards are causing them an inconvenience.

Mobile security incidents experience by most companies in 2012

Rebecca | June 13, 2013

A report from Check Point Software revealed that for nearly half of them, this led to over $100,00 in damages.

A recent report produced by Check Point Software, which was published under the title of “The Impact of Mobile Devices on Information Security” has indicated that over the 12 months preceding their survey 79 percent of businesses experienced an incident relating to mobile security.

The survey not only determined that these issues were quite common but they are also very costly.

The survey included the participation of 790 IT professionals. It was conducted by Dimensional Research, which discovered that for 42 percent of the businesses that experienced these mobile security incidences, 42 percent said that it cost over $100,000 to repair the damages. Moreover, for 16 percent of the participants, the cost of these incidents was greater than $500,000.

Among large businesses, 52 percent said that mobile security incidents cost them over a half million dollars.

Mobile Security Problems Nearly all of the companies that permitted the use of personal smartphones said that there is a growth in the number of these devices connecting to their corporate networks. Moreover, 45 percent of them said that there are five times more personal smartphones connecting to those networks than there had been in 2011.

At the same time, the research suggested that 63 percent of the participating businesses do not manage the corporate information over personal smartphones. Furthermore, 93 percent have stated that they have struggled to implement policies surrounding their BYOD programs. In fact, 67 percent felt that mobile security regarding corporate information is their primary challenge with BYOD policies.

Check Point mobile security evangelist and researcher, Tomer Teller, explained in a statement that “Without question, the explosion of BYOD, mobile apps, and cloud services has created a herculean task to protect corporate information for businesses both large and small.” He added that “An effective mobile security strategy will focus on protecting corporate information on the multitude of devices and implementing proper secure access controls to information and applications on the go. Equally important is educating employees about best practices as majority of businesses are more concerned with careless employees than cybercriminals.”