Mitigating Cyber Threats to Smartphones and Tablets on a Corporate Network

Five billion mobile subscribers worldwide according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). An impressive figure when you consider that there are 6.8 billion people on Earth. Smartphones are making their way to the corporate environment in greater numbers. no longer for managers only, smartphones have become a widespread communications tool -- as a mobile extension to their computers.

Smartphones now allow employees to access their corporate network on the go, read their emails, answer urgent messages, and store boarding passes, presentations, business reports.Small, practical, useful, and versatile, smartphones present many business advantages, but because the security of mobile phones and their related infrastructure is not fully mature, they have the potential to expose your company’s network to many threats. Facing those technical limitations, system administrators must choose between compromising the security of their networks to allow access to smartphone users and limiting their access or directing them to another less-sensitive network. In practice, whenever there is a compromise between usability and security, security loses the battle. The result: most employees can access corporate networks via their smartphone from anywhere and with degraded protection. One can only imagine the damage that may result when those users are using a public access point to get mobile connection! The inevitable choice of usability over security makes smartphones an ideal vehicle for cybercriminals to attack corporate networks. Cybercriminals are like housebreakers: they search for the weak entry (from a remote PC or an infected mobile phone), find a way to make it yield, and then propagate malware, collect e-mail addresses to spam, steal confidential data, and infect corporate hosts to have them join botnets. Which smartphone security threats does your corporate envirinment most commonly face? Send your comments to the Smartphone and Tablet Emporium today: http://smartphoneandtabletzone.blogspot.com/