Information Security

How Enterprises Confront Mobile Security Threats

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:25:03 +0000

How Enterprises Confront Mobile Security Threats admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:25

According to the report conducted by Enterprise Mobility Exchange, "all it takes is one security breach on an employee’s corporate-owned mobile device in a public network, and a hacker could easily gain access to proprietary company data."

Mobile devices are becoming an integral part of business operations. Thus, in addition to their regular activities, enterprises have to cope with mobile security threats. Yet, they are constantly losing this battle.

This especially concerns the enterprises engaging digital nomads in their projects, as accessing a private network from an insecure connection brings great risks.

Even the organizations with strong online security policies applied can fail to deal with these security threats. It happens mostly due to the lack of visibility into online activities employees carry out using corporate mobile devices. This leads to the occurrence of security loopholes that make the corporate data vulnerable. The mentioned report revealed disturbing results on the matter.

The researchers found out that many organizations had no idea how many times their data was compromised. Additionally, many enterprises lack the information on the devices accessing the internet without VPN.

Limiting employees’ access to corporate network via mobile devices will only lead to new complications in completing the tasks, therefore it is not a solution.

If you are also concerned about the issue, let’s move forward and find an appropriate solution. But firstly, it is essential to name mobile security threats enterprises face globally.

Most damaging mobile security threats

The use of corporate and personal mobile devices inside the corporate network is nowadays becoming a part of routine. However, employees do not always think about the risks the company often face due to their reckless actions. They may store or transmit sensitive business data via mobile, open malicious emails when using the company’s mobile devices, or install unverified mobile applications being connected to the corporate network.

Therefore, the employees create the conditions for the spreading of the following most common and harmful mobile security threats.

Data leakage

Corporate data is the most valuable asset both for enterprises and cyberthieves. It is on the top of hackers’ wish list. According to the above-mentioned report, data leakage cases comprise around 44.59% of all the reported incidents, which is quite impressive. And employees accessing a corporate network via their personal mobile devices put at risk not only their private information, but also business data.

Phishing attacks

Email remains the preferred method of communication for the majority of organizations. Due to the low visibility of personnel's activities, there is a risk someone of your employees opens a malicious email. Thus, hackers may get access to confidential data. About 26% of enterprises lose their sensitive data in the result of phishing attacks.

Insecure apps

The use of unverified apps represents the third most prominent cybersecurity threat for enterprises. 9.46% of enterprises lose their confidential data, as their employees tend to use insecure apps.

Hackers make vulnerable apps, such as management tools, to target employees. Such apps may look incredibly similar to authentic apps, but are actually phony and trick users into revealing private data.

Ransomware

Using outdated antivirus and unreliable VPN services is the core reason why ransomware attacks succeed. Many companies do not realize the significance of regular updates of security software.

According to the report, almost 5.4% of ransomware attacks against enterprises lead to data theft due to the use of unreliable security software.

Measures against mobile security threats

The employees’ lack of caution and neglect of simple security rules when using mobile devices can cause the serious security threats. Here are some measures that will help an enterprise to fight against mobile security threats.

Do not allow employees to access the corporate accounts using their personal devices. In case of emergencies, restrict them to a reliable or company-owned VPN service.
Before providing mobile devices to employees, make sure to install a centralized device management tool to give the security team or office authorities a 24/7 access to corporate mobile devices. Thus, in case of security threats or data breach, they can then take prompt action.
Never allow employees to download unverified apps on company-owned devices. There are multiple tools available in the market designed to lock the access to an app store.
Apply policies and regulations to keep employees restricted from using office-owned mobile devices for their personal purposes.
Use remote wipe strategy if crucial data is compromised. This will remove all traces of corporate information from employees’ mobile devices in case of a havoc.

However, implementing these security measures and completely getting rid of the necessity to maintain a proper mobile security level – that’s not how it works. You should regularly perform vulnerability assessment to check the efficiency of the measures applied to make sure no new mobile security loopholes have occurred, and there are no attack vectors for intruders.

Summing it up

Enterprises should change their online security strategies to deal with mobile device security threats. Strict online policies are useless if visibility is not ensured. If a company does not clearly understand how their employees use corporate mobile devices on public networks, they cannot take any appropriate action against cyberattacks and data breach.

By implementing the aforementioned measures, enterprises can significantly improve their mobile security.

Information Security

Asset Tracking Software Is Your Solution to Asset Management Challenges

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:24:24 +0000

Asset Tracking Software Is Your Solution to Asset Management Challenges admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:24

How does asset tracking work?

An asset tracking system comprises two parts – hardware and software. Depending on the assets to be tracked, the hardware part may include GPS trackers, barcodes, QR codes or RFID tags. Placed on an asset, a tracking device communicates with the software (directly or via a scanner), providing it with the data about the asset’s location and properties. The right selection and configuration of hardware are important for ensuring tracking software reliability. Therefore, I recommend providing hardware vendors with a detailed specification for installing and configuring the hardware components.

The software architecture of an asset tracking system may vary depending on an application’s purpose and richness of functionality. To give you an idea of how a high-level architecture of asset tracking software looks like, I refer to an example of a fleet tracking application ITQSOFT delivered for one of the customers:

The application uses drivers’ mobile phones as GPS trackers instead of relying on dedicated devices. The app collects raw GPS data and transfers it to the cloud backend for analysis. The results of the analysis are presented to application users on a mobile app, so that they can track all of the company’s vehicles on a map.

Since asset tracking is an integral part of asset management (for fixed assets) and production (for current assets) processes, to uncover the maximum value of asset tracking apps, I recommend integrating them with available asset management, supply chain management or enterprise resource planning systems. In the case described above, we integrated the app with the customer’s ERP for telemetry data to be automatically imported in it, which allowed the customer to achieve better visibility of transportation-related processes, lower their transportation costs by 11% and improve ROA by 14% over the year.

Why opt for a dedicated asset tracking application?

While it may be tempting to customize asset management or production planning software you already use with asset tracking functionality instead of developing a new application, this option has two downsides.

First, if one part of a system’s business logic gets overloaded, the whole system may stop as it can’t proceed to the next operational stage, hence, you risk facing a complete system shutdown. Second, as your asset base grows, or, say, as there appears a necessity to track assets in real-time, your system has to deal with a higher load, and in a monolithic application, performance can hardly be scaled.

Adds: “Imagine you need to upgrade your system, say, add new features. Even in case of minor changes, you’d need to rewrite pretty much of it, then stop the old version for some time (which means lost asset or production data) to replace it with a new one. Moreover, you’d have to be very careful about newly introduced changes since they might damage the whole system.”

Searching for Ways to Improve Your Asset Management?

ITQSOFT is ready to help you address your asset management challenges with a robust and flexible asset tracking application.

IMPROVE MY ASSET MANAGEMENT

What types of assets can you track?

Modern asset tracking software is well-suited to tracking a wide variety of assets:

Movable assets

When it comes to tracking industrial assets, vehicles, and other types of movable assets, gaining visibility into their locations lays the foundation for getting valuable insights about the movable assets’ utilization as well. For example, we at ITQSOFT developed a custom asset tracking solution for an upstream oil and gas company that had troubles with monitoring the locations and utilization of their onshore oil drilling rigs. With an asset tracking solution, the company achieved the desired level of transparency into the locations and usage patterns of the rigs, improved asset utilization, and reduced downtime.

Assets in regulated industries

Modern tracking technologies facilitate healthcare asset tracking and management of assets in other regulated industries. In laboratory diagnostics, for instance, proper handling of lab samples influences the accuracy of test results, which, in turn, impacts therapeutic decisions and patient care. Thus, a diagnostic laboratory turned to us to optimize its sample labeling, storage, transportation, and disposal processes to comply with ISO 15189:2007. We implemented an asset tracking solution that utilizes barcodes and has a HIPAA-compliant cloud database for storing the data about lab samples’ locations and properties. As a result, laboratory personnel obtained the possibility to access real-time data about the statuses, locations, types, and requisition dates of lab samples.

Inventory

To ensure reliable and continuous inventory tracking, you should keep in mind what conditions inventory items are subject to, what the volume of inventory is, whether this inventory is temperature-sensitive or breakable and whether it is comprised of individual assets or comes in packages or bunches. Based on this information, it’s possible to choose an optimal tracking method and build a solution architecture in a way that enables avoiding signal collisions and ensures continuous tracking of large inventory volumes.

It’s high time you improved your asset management!

With a variety of ready-made asset tracking applications on the market, you may consider opting for an off-the-shelf product. Still, my experience shows that the majority of ready-to-use asset monitoring apps have limited functionality and cannot meet the unique requirements and local labor regulations of the customers. So, it is worth choosing a ready-made application only if you have a small volume of similar assets and do not need any specific functionality.

On the other hand, if your asset base is large and varied, you operate in a regulated industry or need to have specific features and reporting capabilities, as well as want to ensure proper integration with other enterprise systems, custom asset tracking software should be your choice. My team and I are enthusiastic about helping businesses improve their asset management, so if you need our assistance in developing your own asset tracking software, you are welcome to leave us a request.

Information Security