SURVEY: ENTERPRISES LACK MOBILE SECURITY

About 86% of employers allow their employees to use their personal smartphones and PDAs in the workplace and to connect to corporate IT systems, but almost all of those employers fail to set usage policies for those devices, according to a survey just released by market research firm TNS NFO (formerly NFO WorldGroup).

The result of that lack of consideration is that corporate networks and computer systems could be vulnerable to code attacks and information theft that could be orchestrated by employees using these devices.

The survey found that 83.6% of the firms queried said they don't have protective policies in place, and that 74.6% of employees who use these devices don't use or don't know whether or not they have security technology on their own devices.

“Businesses worry a lot today about front-end attacks from hackers and how to stop them,” said Tom Goodman, vice president of operations for Bluefire Security Technologies, the security software firm that commissioned the survey from TFS NFO. “However, they have not paid very much attention to the equally dangerous back-end threat” from their own employees' personal mobile devices.

The survey polled users of handheld devices from a weighted sample of Internet-connected households.

According to other survey findings, about 40% of PDAs and smartphones contain credit card numbers, and more than 25% store personal income information.

“Consumers are clearly storing personal information considered private on their mobile devices, while employees using these devices for business are very likely storing data that their employers would regard as confidential,” said Goodman.