For True Data Security Best Practices Involve Sacrifices Made
Taking your computing on tour has never been easier. Laptops have been miniaturized into full-functioning netbooks,people prefer iPads to netbooks, and full-featured smartphones are capable of substituting for a computer whenever called upon to do so. What with WiFi hotspots proliferating all over and 3G making up for WiFi in other places, working everywhere you go might have turned easier; but keeping your data safe while you do that just became harder. Have you ever been at a jammed airport and had some businessman next to you speak loudly into his phone making a room reservation or something, telling the reservation clerk all about his credit card number, security code and everything else in a way ten people around you could hear? When it refers sensitive information security best practices just became harder to follow.
Apart from being loudmouthed with your whole financial life on the phone in public, there are quite a couple of other ways in which information security best practices are difficult to follow when you carry your office around in your pocket. The antivirus companies report that over the last three months alone, criminals designing malware for smartphones have bear on the market with twice as many “products” as before. Some companies have had so much trouble with having sensitive company information stolen from smartphones belonging to executives on the road that they have built up a policy where any employee traveling out of town is required to pick up a separate device from the company. This phone will usually have nothing that the company would mind losing. Companies sending executives out to developing countries, particularly, find that need to be careful. These countries often have very lax regulations that malware designers are able to exploit.
Some of the times, data thieves had other ways of entering. Typically, they will try to bribe housekeeping staff at hotels where business travelers stay. Those hotel employees will try to infect a laptop or a smartphone that a business traveler has left lying around in his room. For data security, best practices involve having business travelers themselves exercise a bit of caution. Often, they’ll post their entire travel plans on Facebook and open up opportunities for thieves. Sometimes they will just sit at a public Internet terminal at an airport or elsewhere and key in personal information. Almost always, those public terminals are infected.
People traveling on business should not forget that in the area of data security best practices require total disk encryption. Nothing can get safer than that.
