Blog
Mitigating Mobile Risk: Understanding the New Threats Facing Corporate & Government Data
By Bob Stevens
The Global Cyber Alliance understands that protecting mobile devices is not a problem for the future. It’s one that needs to be solved today. The organization is focused on bringing organizations around the world together to better understand and mitigate risk.
Lookout specifically helps enterprises see the risks to their mobile environments and, ultimately, their data. We are very excited to bring the mobile perspective into these conversations.
Enterprises and government agencies need visibility into the risks facing their mobile fleet, but they can’t do that without having data. Lookout is built on over 100 million sensors that feed into our dataset, giving us unusual insight into mobile threats to corporate and government data. We will bring this knowledge to the Global Cyber Alliance and help the industry understand what they’re really up against.
“The days of employees working only at an office using an organization-issued desktop computer fully managed by the organization are largely over,” the Cybersecurity Commission states in its report, “From Awareness to Action.”
Individual employees bring their mobile devices into the workplace and use them for work and personal activities simultaneously. They are able to access data from anywhere in the world — cafes, trains, their desk at work — and send sensitive data through their mobile device to anywhere they please. This may include sending data to personal email addresses, across unauthorized messaging platforms, and more.
Because of this, there are more risks out there than many people think, as it comes to mobile devices. For example, there are:
- Vulnerabilities such as Trident, which may impact the operating system of a mobile device or an application on the device;
- Network threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks that allow an attacker to siphon off data in transit;
- Risky configurations, such an employee enabling application downloads through a setting called “unknown sources;” and
- Mobile malware such as Pegasus, that turns the device into a spying tool.
Enterprises and government security teams need to understand each of these risks in order to properly assess their likelihood and impact within the scope of that specific business or agency. We look forward to bringing that context to the Global Cyber Alliance, working with our partners to mitigate risk in the mobile realm and share important information to make the security community stronger.
The author, Bob Stevens, is the Vice-President, Public Sector, at Lookout, a Global Cyber Alliance partner. You can follow them on Twitter @Lookout.
Editor’s Note: The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the Global Cyber Alliance.
