Friday, 23 March 2007

Firms Overlook Mobile Data Security, Says Symantec

Symantec has published a report that points fingers at firms stating that they are not doing everything in their capacity to guard themselves against data losses from hardware theft.

"We predicted this in the last report but now the criminals are very aggressively going after this data," explained Ollie Whitehouse, a member of Symantec Security Response's Advanced Threat Research team. "We try to educate our clients about the importance of full hard disk encryption on devices but obviously this is not happening in a large number of situations."

Andrew Kellett of analyst Butler Group said, "You need two levels of control; you should encrypt if you're [taking the data] outside the organisation, and you need systems in place to align what people do with the policies of the organisation," he added.

Symantec said that there is an 11 per cent surge in bot net activity. "The increase in bots is pretty substantial when you think that users' personal security is increasing through education and better technology," said Whitehouse.