By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Qwest (News - Alert) Business has recentlyoffered some tips to protect your enterprise network security systems from the mobile blind spot.
Ensuring visibility with continuous monitoring. No insight means no awareness. If you don’t know what’s going on with your network, your data could be at risk. An IT operations tool, company officials say, “that can provide visibility to all corporate assets, including laptops, USB drives” and others, “is essential to preventing breaches.”
A second way to improve mobile security is to protect and update business endpoints. “This is critical,” Qwest officials say, “even when the endpoint is not connected to the LAN. Users can connect to the Internet and unintentionally download viruses and worms that can infect the machine.”
Earlier this month TMC’s (News - Alert) Gary Kim wrote that This year, the number of post-PC devices, such as tablets, eReaders, and Internet-capable mobile phones, will eclipse PC devices, such as desktops, laptops, and netbooks, quoting Andrew Jaquith, Forrester Research (News - Alert) senior analyst.
“That should have many and widespread implications for consumer and business users of those devices, for one simple reason,” Kim says: “Most of us would not think to run our PCs without firewalls, anti-virus and other security measures. But how many of us actively use such protections on our smartphones, tablet PCs, iPod Touch and other devices able to use the Internet, and therefore subject to attacks launched against Internet-connected devices?”
To be sure, this is a problem that does not generally seem to have reached dangerous proportions. Although security experts discover hundreds of new strains of malicious code targeted at PCs every day, they've detected only 67 directed at smartphones in all of 2010, said Sean Sullivan, security adviser for the North American labs of F-Secure (News - Alert).
And one might argue that the use of Linux-derived operating systems, plus the way they are implemented on a mobile device, limits the value of any attempted attack. Android's (News - Alert) Linux operating system apparently runs applications in compartmentalized ways.
