By: Brian Egenrieder, CRO, SyncDog
Phishing attacks are one of the most common vectors threat actors take to steal users’ data from devices. As reported by SecurityWeek, mobile phishing attacks have been increasing at a rate of 85% year over year since 2011. While you may be inclined to think a certain OS is better protected, you would be mistaken. For example, while Apple’s iOS has largely been considered the safest choice by general consumers, 2019 proved that isn’t true with the discovery of Checkm8 and iOS 13 rollout issues. All mobile hardware has its issues and cannot guarantee security. This is particularly true of data that is in transit as network security becomes an additional point of concern.
At least 2.5 billion people worldwide have smartphones. It isn’t shocking that companies are more frequently opting to adopt a BYOD work environment to cut down on business expenses and improve employee productivity. The most significant drawback of this model is the mingling of employees’ personal and corporate data on their devices.
A quick click and an employee can accidentally engage with a phishing email, infecting their device and exposing any data stored on it – a huge personal threat to the employee’s information and an operational/PR nightmare for the company. Phishing attacks pose serious risks to enterprise data and are becoming more and more sophisticated. Standing up fake websites as a form of phishing, that look exactly like the real thing is quite simple, and many users are not familiar with checking URLs and other protections against phishing attacks.
With such a significant cost-risk tradeoff, you may be wondering how you can make a BYOD policy work for your company without falling victim to attacks such as phishing. The answer is through an encrypted application container. An encrypted application container on a mobile device acts as a secure folder for all of an employees’ work applications from Contacts to Skype. They only need to remember one login password to access all their productivity tools. This method allows a company to have control over its data while giving employees the freedom to work wherever they need. In the event an employee leaves the company or loses their device, all corporate data can be remotely wiped without affecting any personal data. This separation of data is as much for the peace of mind of end-users as it is for leadership teams.
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SyncDog’s Secure.Systems mobile security solution is a customizable, encrypted application container designed with the end-user in mind. Learn more about Secure.Systems.
