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Blurred lines: the work-home divide highlights mobile security shortfalls
October 2020 by David Emm, Principal security Researcher at Kaspersky
As remote working becomes more normalised, so too does the notion of your mobile device becoming a one-stop-shop - a sole gateway to people’s consumer and business activities. While this provides levels of ease and access that desktops struggle to reach, it highlights a significant security shortfall that needs addressing urgently. If we’re going to use personal devices as business tools, then we need to secure them like business tools.
In the UK at present, one in five consumers are provided with a company smartphone, while 27% simply use their personal smartphones for work – according to Kaspersky’s research. This emphasises a reality where individuals are sending sensitive work emails in one breath, before sending a Tweet or accessing personal bank accounts in the next. Kaspersky also found that 23% of people admit they don’t have adequate antivirus software installed on their provided devices for business use, and 47% don’t protect their personal smartphones. With that said, it is clear consumers are applying the same level of ambivalence to their business activities as their personal actions.
A premature acceleration to mobile
It’s a concerning trend that opens up the threat landscape to cybercriminal opportunists.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, (48%) of the UK’s 32.9 million workers have been operating remotely due to lockdown restrictions. This hasn’t gone unnoticed among those who would take advantage of potentially insecure digital infrastructures. Sensitive corporate data is now being handled not just in people’s homes, but through people’s mobile devices as a primary platform. If these devices aren’t secure, or if the Wi-Fi network used to send and receive data is insecure, this could compromise the corporate data stored on, or sent from, the device.
The normalisation of mobile device usage for work is epitomised by more than half of UK employees responding to work emails through that preferred portal. Why wouldn’t they, to tick off a seemingly routine task with such ease? However, when one third admit to having never even thought about protecting their phones with antivirus protection, it’s clear to see how email attachments and sensitive information can suddenly become exposed or vulnerable.
