I know that many security 'professionals' will scaremonger and preach doom and gloom at every turn in order to drive up sales. However, they're not always wrong. I read the article 'Mobile device users fail to take basic steps to protect themselves, survey finds' and wanted to relate an event that happened this weekend. Many people are saying that mobile device security threats are hype and that nobody is actually exploiting them. That's possibly true to a certain extent at the moment, but for how long? Another article claims that identity theft is now more profitable than car theft! A mobile phone is a very good start for this purpose. An interesting figure that comes from the article above is that 160,000 mobile phones are lost or stolen every day. I assume that this is just in America, as in Britain the figure is around 20,000 a day . Whether or not these figures are accurate is immaterial, the fact remains that a lot of phones go missing. What do you hav...

InfoSecurity Europe is over for another year. Once again there were several interesting companies and sessions worth noting. The 'themes' (if they can be called that) or 'hot topics' were cloud security again, social media and mobile access/the consumerisation of IT. The big difference seemed to be in the attitudes of people - more 'how can we reduce the risks to an acceptable level?' rather than 'we can't secure it, so we won't allow it!' We are seeing a shift in the types of systems end users are accessing the corporate network from. The IT department are no longer dictating what will or will not be allowed. More and more users want to use their own personal devices, such as iPhones or iPads, on the network. In the past IT departments have resisted this and said no to the users. However, this attitude is beginning to change and there were a raft of organisations with solutions to help secure these devices and manage the data they contain. How...

Once again InfoSecurity Europe was an interesting place to visit. Lots of good sessions and interesting people to talk to. Most of the usual protagonists were there and the organisers have increased the educational part of the exhibition as well, which is good. I thought I would put down a few things that I thought were noteworthy from the exhibition. I've already blogged about the GrIDsure anti-phishing sender verification and the new 3M mobile phone privacy filters , but there were a few other things I want to mention. The first one is Panda Security's new Panda Cloud Internet Protection . This is a cloud-based service that provides consistent security and access policies to all machines within an organisation. The key thing is that it will protect mobile machines that are outside the corporate network with the same policies as those within the network. Protecting corporate machines when mobile is a big concern and a good way to reduce malware or hacking problems on the...

At this year's InfoSecurity Europe I visited the 3M stand again to see what developments they had for their privacy filters. They had their excellent Gold filter there of course, which is now properly on sale in the UK and the best on the market in my opinion. I previously blogged about this filter in my post " Why do I need a privacy filter? (3M's new Vikuiti Gold Privacy Filter) ". So what's this blog post about? Well, they have now produced privacy filters for mobile phones. Let's add a bit of context to this decision. How many businesses provide mobile devices to their employees that are connected to the corporate network with access to email, contacts, calendars and corporate documents? If you were reading an email from a client or reviewing a sensitive document would you be happy for someone to peer over your shoulder? Maybe you're paranoid like me and try to avoid reading emails in public places and stand with your back to the wall, shielding th...

I was asked recently to look at the security of the PhoneFactor 2-factor authentication solution. If you don't know what it is, then you can find out more here , but essentially you enter your username and password, then they phone you on your pre -defined number and press the # key to validate the authentication. The problem with just pressing the # key is obvious, but they allow you to configure entering a PIN number rather than just pressing the # key. To my mind, there should be no other option than having to type in the PIN number. However, this isn't necessarily a brilliant idea. As I've said before in this blog , a lot of phones log the digits dialled, in which case that PIN isn't secure. I was also told that the PSTN and GSM networks are secure, so this is a good solution. I'm not sure I agree that PSTN and GSM networks have good security. Analogue PSTN is easy to listen in to with proximity and GSM can theoretically be cracked, and probably will ...

Computer Weekly recently conducted a survey via Twitter on how many organisations allow their users access to corporate email from their own private phone. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any results from this survey as yet, but it made me think about organisations that do allow private devices to attach to the network, not just mobile phones. I have also had many comments on my blog post entitled ' Mobile Device Data Breaches ', which have fed into this post. In one of those comments, someone pointed out that in their experience users are often a weak link. Isn’t it always the case that users are the weakest link? A poorly educated/trained user can compromise the best security. Unfortunately, I have seen so many organisations that do not adequately train their users or make them aware that there are policies, let alone what they mean to their daily usage of the corporate systems. I have also come across one organisation where a top executive had all the system passwords st...

Comodo Vision Video Blog Several recent data breaches at major enterprises and governmental agencies stemmed from the loss or theft of mobile computers and USB drives. While encrypting the data on these devices isn’t a bad idea, the larger question is why was sensitive personal information stored on the mobile device in the first place? See my first video blog for Comodo Vision here .