Mobile Security: Take It or Leave It

Today’s mobile devices allow us to store gigabytes of data in them and on the tiny removable (read: easily lost) memory expansion cards that go along with them.  When does having our data with us become having too much data with us?  Should we be cramming our devices with our personal and business data?  Should we be keeping everything on our desktops and corporate servers?  Or, does the answer lay somewhere in the middle?

Meet Your Auxiliary Brain

As our mobile computers, including Palm handhelds, Treos, cell phones and even iPods, become such an important part of our lives, we trust them with more and more of our personal information.  It starts out with some phone numbers and addresses and then expands to daily agendas.  Before you know it, we’re storing passwords, financial accounts, and even corporate documents on these devices.

While our TXs and Treos are very handy multipurpose tools that we use every day in our professional and personal lives, they are double edged swords.  What if we lose our devices?  What then?  Sure we have copies of the data on our computers, but what about the data that is on the device and memory expansion card.  Who is now in control of our personal information?  How embarrassing will the release of that data to the public be?  What is the risk of keeping all of that data with us all of the time?

Risk Mitigation

Users of mobile computing devices have to make up their minds as to how much data they are willing to lose in the event a device is lost or stolen.  It’s a personal question to be sure.  Unless you are using a corporate issued device, in which case someone else likely made the decision for you.

There are some things that you can do to help prevent the loss of personal and business records to people you never intended to see it.  First, consider the data you are going to load on the device.  Is there anything sensitive about it?  If not, it is probably safe to load it on the device.

If you are going to store business documents on your memory expansion card, you might want to consider password protecting them on the desktop before transferring them to the device. DataViz Documents To Go and Mobi-Sys Office 7 allow you to work with password protected documents from your desktop.  While Microsoft Office passwords may not be the strongest form of data protection out there, it is better than nothing.

Password Managers

As our lives continue to become more digital, some would same more complicated, we find ourselves having to remember a dizzying array of passwords, PIN numbers, and other access codes just to make it through a typical day.

Password managers are secure applications in which you can store things like account numbers, website passwords, and other confidential information.  When you launch the application, the database is decrypted and open for use.  When you change to another application, the database is re-encrypted.

DataViz Passwords Plus, Chaprua TurboPasswords, and TealPoint TealSafe are all examples of some of the popular password managers that are available to both personal and business users alike.

Poison Pills

Smartphone users should also consider adding a poison pill to their device.  Poison pills are panic buttons for lost or stolen devices.  An inexpensive consumer application for Treo smartphones is Bluefish Wireless’ Central for Treo.  Central is a collection of useful tools for the Treo.  One of the security features allows you to setup a pass phrase.  Once setup and configured, if your device is ever lost or stolen, just SMS the pass phrase to your device and upon receipt of the code, the contents of the expansion card and internal memory is erased. 

Corporate customers usually demand this feature in their mobile enterprise solutions, such as those offered by Good Technology.  If you are using a corporate issued smartphone, contact your IT department for more information.

Conclusion

PDAs and smartphones provide us with an amazing level of utility.  The amount of information that we can now carry around with us and have at our finger tips is incredible.  However, must of us fail to take the steps to protect that data should our devices ever become lost or stolen.

The next time you go to load data on to your device, consider asking yourself if you really need to have it with you.  If you are going to take that document with you, have you applied some level of security around it?

As the storage capacity of ever shrinking memory expansion cards increases, we also need to increase our protection of the data on those cards.

What do you think?  Let us know in the forms.