Sept/Oct 2004

People who use portable computing devices simply don't take security seriously. That's the inescapable conclusion of the Mobile Vulnerability Survey 2004, a piece of research commissioned jointly by a group led by Pointsec Mobile Technologies.

The survey found that almost half of PDAs are now used to receive and view corporate emails, while a third double as a phone. Yet two thirds of users don't use any kind of encryption to protect contact details and messages, the report says.

This comes in spite of the fact that over 50 per cent of companies have a mobile computing security policy, compared with 27 per cent last year. The conclusion: employees simply don't implement it.

The survey found that 13 per cent of respondents had lost a mobile device, and the most likely places to lose a one were in a taxi (30 per cent), car (20 per cent), the home (20 per cent), an airport (10 per cent) and a restaurant (10 per cent). It takes a user an average of two days to recover, reconfigure and re-enter data on a new PDA, the report reckons.

 

Remarkably, the survey found that half of companies don't inform the police when they lose mobile devices, as they believe there is nothing they can do; and almost half don't inform their insurance company either.