Keeping Your Smartphone Safe Helps Everyone

Mobile devices accompany us more or less everywhere, leading us to use them more and more frequently in all aspects of lie, including for business purposes. As a result, cybercriminals have even more motivation to target them. To help you avoid a mobile device being the downfall of your company’s security, we’ve assembled a few practices you and your staff should adopt.

Keep It with You

Hopefully, you aren’t naturally inclined to leave a thousand-dollar gadget lying around willy-nilly, but it doesn’t hurt to bring up the possibility anyways. Your phone should never be left unattended out in public, as any data that the device has access to is put at risk. This includes your own data, as well as company documents if the device was used to access them via a Bring Your Own Device arrangement. While BYOD policies typically include remote wiping measures, who knows what data may have been viewed before the wipe was initiated?

Be Selective Concerning Wireless Networks

Under the right conditions, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are great, allowing a user to connect to the Internet and other devices that boost their phone’s utility. Unfortunately, these connections can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing - unsecured networks can easily subject your device (and the data it contains) to any number of threats. A good way to minimize the chances of this happening are to avoid making connections to unknown networks, using your data plan if you have to.

Protect Your Sensitive Credentials

As people use their phones for almost everything these days, most of these devices now allow a user to store passwords, PIN numbers, and payment card information on the phone itself for simplified access. The thing is, if your phone was to fall into the wrong hands, this means that the person who now has the device is given that simplified access. While the best move is to simply choose not to store these details in your phone, there are secure applications that are much better to use if you do. For help in selecting one, reach out to us.

Clean Out the Data You’ve Generated

There’s a lot of data that your phone retains, from the words (including personal data) that its autocomplete records, to the web browsing app’s history. All of this data and more is very valuable to a cybercriminal, so as a precautionary measure it is good to clear out this data every so often.

To keep your data safe, you need to protect it from all of the potential ways it can be breached. Directive has the tools and experience to help. Reach out to us at 607.433.2200 to learn more.