8 dangerous consumer technologies in corporate reveal by Computerworld Malaysia.
Date: Sunday November 4, 2007Posted in: Blogging, Technology
Do you read your company’s policy carefully and fully understand what are the do and don’t as an employee to protect your company’s confidential data and security breaches?
With the current high-tech consumer products and services, it has been very difficult for companies to protect their data; in the order words, it increases the risk of security breaches.
Computerworld Malaysia revealed 8 dangerous consumer technologies in corporate. Let’s see whether we use these tools in our daily working life.
1.Instant Messaging (IM)
- company’s network are exposured to numerous security challenges like malware that enter corporate’s network through IM. IM is one of the most “important tools” for myself in office. We use IM to communicate among colleagues for troubleshooting and escalation issues. In fact, to be honest, I used it a lot for chatting with my friends as well for non-work related issues. So that we won’t feel so boring in office and keep our work going right? I’ve heard several multinational companies are using there own IM software for communication within their company’s network only. The main purposes is to prevent malware attraction.
2.Web mail
- Did you check your personal emails at office? Ohh, Yes. I Do!!! But we really need to make sure we didn’t send any sensitive information like confidential business data throught web mail.
3. Portable storage devices
- USB storage devices, mobile phones with internal or external storage and even iPods are all categorized in this area. I think this is the most difficult area to control for security breaches. You cannot stop employees from carrying these devices to work. As in some extends, these technologies really helps employees to improve their efficiency and productivity.
4.PDAs and Smart Phones
- Blackberry??? More and more manager level personal in our company are using blackberry and smart phones. Of aused it’s for work related purposes (access company’s email anywhere in the world, means you got no excuse no to response to your email during off office hours or outstation), but how do you prevent them from stealing company’s confidential data?
5.Camera phones
- with the current advance technology, it has been very difficult for you to find a phones without camera. Yes, I means a mobile phone without camera. Even some cheap mobile phones are embeded with some lower end VGA camera. Some factories prevented employees and vendors to take their camera phones into the production areas.
6.Skype and other VoIP services
- Skype is really a great tool for communication and conference call as it’s free and also it provided good quality of sounds and pictures. As it’s broadly use in corporate environment, it also expose corporate network for worm attacks. With this, some companies have blocked Skype traffic thought network. If you need to install for work related purposes, you will need to have manger’s approval as it will be easier for IT personal to track the no of copies install and its usage.
7.Downloadable widgets
- widgets can easily downloaded into your mobil phones for quick access to web application. This represents a potential threat.
8.Virtual worlds
- Communications among uses in the virtual world by using avatars. It use a lot of network bandwidth. This can actually being blocked from corporate’s firewall for any misuse.
In my opinions, i would think that the most important step to prevent these security breaches is to create awareness among employees for the risk of software usage and educate them to follow company’s policy. However, it will never been simple to say then done. The most simple step normally is the most difficult for implementations. That’s why recently we can see a lot of companies are currently hiring for IT Security Engineers…right? It creates a lot of job opportunities as well.
If you want to know more on this, download the October 2007 issues from Computerworld Malaysia.
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