The mobile apps you use every day are an amazing tool that keep you productive and engaged with your work. They can also be a massive security threat. The risk mobile apps represent isn’t necessarily from malware or viruses; much of the time, user behavior is the bigger problem. Read on to learn about some of the greatest risks connected to mobile apps and how you can protect your company from them.
Personal Apps that Mine Corporate Data
There are many mobile apps out there which are perfectly safe… until the user permits them to transmit data from his or her device. That’s when the problems start.
Some mobile apps need information available on the device or on a network in order to function. However, the user doesn’t have any idea who’s accessing and utilizing information, nor to what end. The app could be transmitting valuable corporate data to cybercriminals or hostile foreign governments.
What steps can you take to prevent this situation from becoming reality? Educate your employees about the risks apps pose. Explain to them that they shouldn’t give permission to apps to transmit data, because it could fall into the wrong hands.
Hostile Enterprise-Signed Apps
In a way, these apps are similar to the applications mentioned above. They rely upon distribution code native to widely used mobile operating systems (such as Android and iOS) to send data outside of a network, into the waiting arms of cybercriminals or corporate spies.
Again, user education is crucial to preventing the impact of hostile enterprise-signed apps. Tell your employees that they should give their apps the minimum amount of necessary permissions. If the app is asking for more permissions than seem reasonable, don’t give in.
Running Apps that Haven’t Been Updated
App developers are under a great deal of pressure to bring their product to market as quickly as possible. As a result, they don’t always have the time to spend on updates to apps that would make them more secure and less prone to malware and other security threats. Furthermore, users don’t realize that updating their apps is important. So, even if there is an update floating around out there, chances are they haven’t bothered installing it.
If user education sounds like a recurring theme, it is. Explain to your employees why it’s critical to update their apps, and to choose apps from developers that they know will have frequent updates.
Downloading Suspicious Apps
Some people would never fall for an email phishing scam, yet they’d readily click on a link to download an app they received in an SMS on their smartphone. These people also see nothing wrong with downloading an app they found outside of an app store.
Yet again, user education about choosing safe apps is vital. You can also use technology to prevent suspicious apps from wreaking havoc on your network by implementing a mobile application management (MAM) system. This software creates a list of trusted apps and distributes them to corporate user devices.
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