It’s a nightmare scenario ? you lose your smartphone. Wallets are no longer the only item in our purses, bags or back pockets that need protecting. Most peoples’ smartphones contain personal information ? like account passwords that can easily make financial transactions.
Norton AntiVirus maker Symantec employee Kevin Haleyand and Scott Wright of Security Perspectives Inc. set up an experiment called, ”
The Symantec Smartphone Honey Stick Project” to see how many “lost” smartphones would be returned and if the data would be accessed. They planted 50 smartphones in five cities: New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco and Ottawa, Canada. Each phone was set up with simulated personal and corporate data and equipped so that Haley and Wright could monitor what was accessed on the phones.
The results, well, let’s just say people are curious creatures. Six out of 10 finders tried to access the social media and email accounts on the phones, but perhaps they were trying to find the owner’s contact information. However, eight out of 10 finders attempted to access files marked, “HR Salaries” and “HR Cases.” And nearly half of the people who found the phones tried to access the phone owner’s bank account.
The bottom line: Protect your data. Symantec offered
data protection tips for corporate executives with company smartphones and consumers with personal smartphones. Tips included: Use the screen lock feature and have a password to access the phone; don’t leave your phone unattended and add something to it to make it stand out amongst other phones (a sticker or a case); and get your hands on some smartphone security software.
Smartphones are so convenient because they carry such a massive amount of our personal information, which also makes losing one so upsetting. If you’ve lost your phone, you’ve not only lost the device (which can be pricy) but you’ve also lost all the valuable information on it. Haley thought about this dilemma after his wife was mugged and the contents of her purse were stolen. The first question he asked her, he says in a
blog post on Symantec was, “Are you all right?,” followed by “Did you cancel the credit cards and call a locksmith to change our locks?” and third, “Did they get your phone?” Haley says in the post that he realized this was a major security problem.
It would be easy to argue why losing your smartphone would be worse than losing your wallet. At least with a tangible wallet you can cancel cards and reorder them. Sure, you’re out whatever money you had in your wallet, but for the most part only a few steps are needed to remedy a missing wallet. Losing a smartphone, on the other hand, means someone has access to your personal emails, text messages and the most worrisome: Many apps will sign into your accounts simply by opening them. Smartphones don’t contain our driver’s license with our personal address, but anyone who uses it can see all of our friends and if you’re a check-in type, (Foursquare, Facebook) they can see where you’ve been.
What do you do to keep the information on your smartphone safe? Tell us in the comments.
?Photo courtesy of
iStockphoto,
TommL?
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