Today, security is the big word in technology. After the PR disasters that followed Sony, the leaking of hundreds of celebrity’s personal pictures, along with dozens of smaller leaks over the past few years, more companies are exploring new avenues of security.
If your company experiences an information leak, it damages your standing in the public eye and in the eyes of your clients, customers and stockholders, and could cost you thousands or even millions of dollars.
But what does that mean for your mobile devices?
Mobile Phone Encryption
If someone’s personal device is stolen, in most cases the thief will be more interested in wiping the data to make it easier to sell it. If they are aiming to steal information from it, however, they will prefer to keep the data. By encrypting your data, you make it harder to steal and harder to scrub clean to be resold.
According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, “two out of three lost smartphones contained sensitive or confidential business information, which makes mobile device encryption especially important.”
Encryption works by storing, “your phone’s data in an unreadable, seemingly scrambled form. When you power on your phone, you’ll have to enter the encryption PIN or password, which is the same as your phone’s lock-screen PIN or password. Your phone uses your PIN or password to decrypt your data, making it understandable. If someone doesn’t know the encryption PIN or password, they can’t access your data.”
Mobile Vulnerability
There was also the recent revelation that more than 600 million Samsung smartphones are vulnerable to hacking due to an oversight in the keyboard, which should illustrate just how vulnerable mobile devices can be.
“A remote attacker capable of controlling a user’s network traffic can manipulate the keyboard update mechanism on Samsung phones and execute code as a privileged (system) user on the target’s phone,” says Now Secure, the company that brought the exploit to public attention.
“The Swift keyboard comes pre-installed on Samsung devices and cannot be disabled or uninstalled. Even when it is not used as the default keyboard, it can still be exploited.” If your data is on anything, whether it be a server, a USB key or a mobile device, it needs to be protected and kept from wandering out into the wild.
There are downsides to encrypting. Performance will be slowed down, and it can only be disabled by resetting the device to its factory settings. The upsides, like the security and peace of mind you will experience, make up for that. If your employees regularly use mobile devices, either given by the company or their own personal devices, you need to enable encryption to keep your data safe.
WinMagic – Your Trusted Source for Mobile Device Encryption Solutions
Are you looking for mobile device encryption solutions? Contact WinMagic today at 1-888-879-5879. WinMagic has been helping customers secure data through encryption since 1997.Our products have won several awards, and we have five million clients in over 80 countries. Find out how our data encryption solutions can work for you and your business by speaking with a customer service representative.
