Technology Sectors
Watch your mobile device on Black Friday
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Geoff Webb |
On Monday, November 14, Credant Technologies released an interesting survey of missing and lost mobile devices at the top 15 shopping malls in the U.S. Long story short, 2,200 tablets, smartphones and USB drives were found.
Most interestingly, half of these devices (1,110) were never recovered. About three out of five devices were found in mall food courts, while about two out of five were found in restrooms.
While the survey numbers themselves are interesting (they certainly show that a lot of mobile devices get lost at malls), I think there are a few underlying things here that should be examined.
The first is that – surprisingly -- only half of the devices lost were subsequently reclaimed. It’s a reasonable assumption that the owners of the lost devices (which were primarily smartphones and tablets) were less than happy to discover that the device was gone, so the fact that they never claimed them again suggests that they didn’t discover the loss until some time after they left the mall. This is hardly surprising. While tablets are relatively large, most smartphones are easy to misplace and it can very difficult to determine where and when it was lost.
And, while the inconvenience to the owner was probably considerable, the security implications of this growing tide of lost phones are far greater. More and more users are bringing their own smartphones with them to work and expecting to use them to access email, other online services, and increasingly, The Cloud. Smartphones are, in reality, very powerful small computers, often with large amounts of storage space, that just happen to have a phone attached. And, while these devices may not be as powerful as a laptop, the loss of one can certainly punch a large hole in your organization’s security.
Perhaps the biggest threat comes from the increasing proliferation of “consumerized” Cloud services, especially storage services, such as Dropbox, Box.net and many others. These services provide workers a simple and convenient way to quickly back-up, store and share files. And, most importantly, those same services can be accessed from one of the very powerful, very “loseable” smartphones.
From a local, state or federal agency or department’s perspective, this is a recipe for serious disaster. An employee, using a Cloud service to share files via their smartphone, could accidentally expose sensitive information when they lose that device. Whether the files are actually stored on the device or simply accessible via the smartphone, the agency is faced with the problem of a potential breach occurring as a result of a simple accident.
Ultimately, that’s the real cost of these lost devices -- not the actual hardware itself, but the fact that, more and more, they represent a gateway to almost unlimited Cloud-based services and storage, much of which is difficult to control and secure, and which may leave you and your organization trying to pick up the pieces after a very damaging breach.
Geoff Webb is director of product marketing at Credant Technologies. He can be reached at:
