Will the Next Big Security Breach be from a Phone?

June 26, 2009 – 11:58 am

phonebreach Many times when companies have a “security breach” — meaning a bunch of their client’s confidential information lost or stolen — it’s due to a company laptop disappearing during a conference or being stolen from an office place. Previous examples of this happening would be the California Department of Health (a loss of 21,600 records), Bank of America (18,000 records on one of many occasions) and Fidelity Investments (196,000 records). Keep in mind this in only a few of the hundreds of reported security breaches due to laptops since 2005.

Now a recent study finds that 35% of IT professionals don’t password protect their phones. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal except that 80% profess to keeping sensitive corporate data on their phones! With those kind of statistics it’s only a matter of time before lost or stolen smart phones lead to a large data breach. One that may even contain your sensitive data.

Businesses, institutes and universities have all created guidelines for storing and transporting computers with sensitive information to combat their eventual loss. Very few seem to be looking ahead to do the same for smart phones.

Which again speaks towards making sure you protect yourself. No one else is going to look out for you. Place credit fraud monitoring on your credit accounts or sign up for preventative services like LifeLock. I say LifeLock because it has a Better Business Bureau rating of A+ and in the three years of monitoring has had 41 complaints — ALL of which has been resolved to the complete satisfaction of the customer. No matter how responsible YOU are with your identity information, there’s always going to be Bob the IT guy walking around with your personal information on his unprotected iPhone.

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