Cracking Phones and Tablets
I don’t envy IT administrators and information security managers for many reasons but especially when it comes to the bring your own device (BYOD) movement taking place in business today. With BYOD, you have to trust that your users are making good decisions about security, and you have to figure out how to manage each and every device, platform, and app. This management task is arguably the greatest challenge IT professionals have faced to this point. Further complicating matters, you have criminal hackers, thieves, and other hooligans doing their best to exploit the complexity of it all, and it’s creating some serious business risks. The reality is that very few businesses — and individuals — have their phones and tablets properly secured.
Plenty of vendors claim that their mobile device management (MDM) solutions are the answer to phone and tablet woes. They’re right … to an extent. MDM controls that separate personal information from business information and ensure the proper security controls are enabled at all times can help you make a big leap toward locking down the mobile enterprise.
One of the greatest things you can do to protect phones and tablets from unauthorized use is to implement this nifty security control that dates back to the beginning of computers: passwords. Yep, your phone and tablet users should employ good old- fashioned passwords (technically passphrases) that are easy to remember yet hard to guess. Passwords are one of the best controls you can have. Yet there are plenty of mobile devices with no passwords or passwords that are easily cracked.
