Tag: mobile security study

Mobile security attitudes in the UK remain weak

| November 26, 2013

British consumers carrying smartphones and tablets still do not take adequate precautions to protect themselves.

According to a recent mobile security study that was conducted by Trend Micro, a security firm, many consumers in the United Kingdom who have smartphones and tablets have yet to adopt appropriate precautions in order to guard themselves against the theft of their data.

The survey involved the participation of 2,500 device users throughout the United Kingdom.

The results of this study indicated that 27 percent of the research participants have lost up to three company devices. Another 52 percent regularly carry a device on their person that contains sensitive data from work, which increases the risk that their employers and customers could experience fraud from a mobile security data breach.

This mobile security finding should be taken seriously by businesses in the country.

Mobile Security - UKThe survey showed that 61 percent of the participants who use their smartphones and tablets for work purposes have not even protected those devices with a password. Among all of the participants 20 percent were using their personal smartphones for business reasons, which means that this number of unprotected device users is a considerable one. Among those who have gone to the effort of protecting their devices with a password, 63 percent have used the same one or a similar one across all of their various digital accounts.

Almost one in every three participants said that they use Wi-Fi hotspots on a regular basis. However 56 percent of hotspot users do not check the security of those spaces before they connect. Twenty two percent access their work emails from those locations, while 10 percent access confidential documents in those public connection environments.

This survey indicates that in the United Kingdom, there is a standard of relative carelessness when it comes to their attitude toward mobile security and the link between their behaviors and the safety of corporate data when using their smartphones and tablets for work purposes, said the report. In fact, among the respondents, 44 percent had a greater concern regarding the loss of their own personal content than they had about giving access to sensitive business data to cyber criminals.

Mobile security policies in place at only 14 percent of businesses

| August 29, 2013

The majority of companies have not fully implemented a policy for the use of wireless devices.

According to the results of a study that have recently been released, only 14 percent of companies have put a fully developed mobile security policy into place for their computer networks.

At the same time, the number of threats and incidents within that environment are rapidly rising.

Furthermore, the study also discovered that the majority of the companies that do not have mobile security policies in place also have no intention of limiting the use of personal smartphones and tablets for work-related purposes. The research in question was the Global Corporate IT Security Risks 2013 study From B2B International, which was conducted among businesses worldwide, this spring, in collaboration with Kaspersky Lab.

B2B International’s statement about the mobile security study was that many companies had experienced data leaks.

Mobile Security policiesIt revealed that among the respondents of the survey by B2B International, 6 percent of the companies had experienced a mobile security data leakage of confidential information at least once within the previous 12 months. Though this may represent an increase of only 1 percent over the figures from 2012, the attacks on smartphones and tablets led to a larger number of critical data leaks than any of employee fraud (at 4 percent), phishing attacks (at 5 percent) or corporate espionage (at 3 percent).

According to the release regarding the study’s results, “The reason is obvious; more mobile devices – smartphones and tablets – are being used at work on a daily basis. These devices are also often owned by the employees themselves, and so are used for personal as well as business purposes.”

It also pointed out that while the ability to add both corporate and personal data (such as apps and contact lists) on a single device is highly convenient, it also means that there is a considerably higher mobile security risk to the business. Almost 65 percent of the participants in the survey admitted that they allowed their workers to bring their own devices (also known as bring your own device – BYOD – where workers use their own personal smartphones and tablets for work purposes). This is clearly a growing threat to corporate IT infrastructure security when the fact that no protection policies have been put in place.