A third of professionals using mobile devices such as
PDAs and smartphones are failing to use passwords or any other
security protection, and even store their PIN numbers, passwords
and other corporate information on the devices.
The findings, from Pointsec’s Annual Mobile Usage Survey, shows
that corporate personnel now store significant amounts of corporate
data on their mobile devices, including customer contacts, email
details, passwords and bank account details, together with personal
and private information such as friends’ details, and personal
images, giving little or no consideration to security.
Some 78% of users do not encrypt the information on their PDA or
smartphone, with 81% using these devices to store business names
and addresses, 45% to receive and view emails and 27% to store
corporate information. For 59% of users their PDA or smartphone is
also used as a business diary and 14% use them to store information
regarding their customers.
What’s surprising about the survey is people’s propensity to
lose the very devices on which their lives depend so much. Last
year, 16% of users had lost one, while this year the number has
increased to 22%. Of those that lost their device, 81% had not
encrypted their information and admitted that they were worried
that the information could fall into the wrong hands and either
cause embarrassment, or that they would lose "everything" as they
hadn't backed-up their information.
When it comes to PDA security, it seems anything that could go
wrong, does go wrong. Hopefully, users will learn about security
the hard way. Once you’ve lost all your contacts, numbers etc once,
you’ll make sure you don’t do it again.