Last week, we discussed five of 11 statistics regarding mobile security. While most if not all CIOs, CTOs and IT directors understand the risks mobile poses for their enterprise security, many individual employees do not. As such, we wanted to take the time to put together some statistics that illustrate the severity of the threat so that employees and consumers alike will take security protocols more seriously.
With that, I give you statistics six through 11.
Malicious content was hidden within social media behind shortened web links 32 percent of the time.
Social media has become invaluable to many enterprises, whether through advertising reach, trend tracking, branding, market intelligence, big data harvesting, etc. Many individuals get most of their news through social networks by clicking on links shared by their friends and/or colleagues.
In a 140 character world, url shorteners entered the picture so that you could tweet web links without killing all your available characters. But, it is just as easy for hackers or security threats to hide behind these shortened links as legitimate content producers. As such, it’s important that you don’t click on everything that has an interesting title; you have to trust the source of the tweet or Facebook post before you think about clicking on it. If the New York Times tweets something out? You’re probably good. If someone you don’t know tweeted something “by the New York Times,” you probably shouldn’t click on it. If that article does actually exist, you can always just go to nytimes.com and find it that way.
Only one in five emails sent were legitimate, as spam increased to 76 percent of email traffic, and 92 percent of spam included links to potentially malicious content
The primary tool for phishing or virus implantation on your device(s) is email. As you can see, only 20 percent of emails sent last year were real emails intended to go to real people containing real content. Spam was 76 percent of ALL email traffic last year. Even more disturbing, within that spam contingency, 92 percent of those messages included links to potentially injurious content.
That means that 70 percent of all emails sent last year contained potentially malicious links. Always watch what you click on…
51 percent of organizations have had data loss due to insecure devices
This statistic is more concerned with mobility in particular, namely, that more than half of all organizations have suffered data loss due to device insecurity. Whether that’s employees losing their phones, sharing data or documents they shouldn’t have, installing bogus apps on their phones, etc., more companies than not have now suffered data breach due to mobile devices.
As an IT department, it’s more important than ever to have strict data policy in place, complete with training, continuing education, mobile device management services, and remote wipe capabilities.
As individual employees, it’s your responsibility to adhere to the policies set by your IT departments in order to protect the security of your firm.
59 percent of organizations experienced an increase in malware infection due to insecure mobile devices.
In addition to suffering from data loss, almost 60 percent of companies saw more malware infections emanating from mobile devices. Mobile devices, especially within firms that embrace BYOD or CYOD mobile policies, have become the achilles’ heel of their security operations. Once again, it’s more important than ever to have a strict security protocol in place to which you can hold your employees accountable.
As employees, these are very often your devices that you own that become infected with malware. Take the necessary steps to mitigate your risk!
Average cost of a breach is $5.5 million
Here’s where it gets real. For companies that suffer a full-scale data breach, the average cost of repairing that breach is $5,500,000. While that number might not be as meaningful for small businesses because that figure also takes into account massive data breaches like you saw with Target or Visa, it still illustrates how disastrous data loss can be.
That’s a number many companies cannot absorb. You cannot sleep on the threat posed by mobile devices to your firm’s security unless you’re comfortable risking financial losses like that.
Cybercrime in 2011 cost consumers $110 billion worldwide and $21 billion in the US according to Symantec’s recently released annual Cybercrime Report.
Just to put the entire theme of electronic security in context, the annual cost to consumers is staggering. $110 billion worldwide in 2011; that number is almost certainly much higher for 2012 or 2013.
Security is one of the cornerstone issues within our increasingly interconnected world. The more of our lives we commit online, the more we open ourselves up to threats. The more we conduct our careers remotely or on-the-go via mobile devices, the more we open up ourselves and our companies to data theft. This is a gigantic problem, and only by defining a strict security policy and rigorously enforcing it can you ensure that these types of breaches won’t happen to you.
