PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Even dyed-in-the-wool fans of technology populism and mobility will admit (if they think about it) that increasingly powerful smartphones are loose cannons in terms of security. They're handling enterprise e-mail. They're connecting to enterprise networks. They're surfing your intranet and network file system under executive authentication. They can be used deliberately (or remotely subverted into use) as behind-the-firewall hacking tools, hop-off points and denial-of-service nodes, even by relatively crude attacks like cross-site request forgery.
Most of them are also vulnerable—or provide convenient hacking points of entry—when USB- (for access to mass storage, local sync or use in tethering) or Bluetooth-linked. Not to mention camera hacks.
Luckily, as recently reported in eWEEK by Chris Preimesberger, suppliers of network infrastructure aren't taking the potential threat of mobile (or the fact that 99.999 percent of execs would rather die than surrender their pretty toys—causing a kind of "perfect storm" of potential profitability) lying down. Juniper Networks' Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite—aimed at enterprise and mobile carriers—includes antivirus, personal firewall, anti-spam, device theft prevention, and monitoring and control services, and lets businesses secure e-mail and designated applications with encryption and policy-management tools. The Juniper product thus brings to free-range iPhone and Android mobiles (and BlackBerrys) protection comparable to that heretofore available only with BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And its availability (provided the solution delivered is of high quality) may, in some cases, stimulate a rethink of BES-centric enterprise mobility policy.
Meanwhile, responsible IT leaders should also be looking beyond mobile device and connection security and assessing the darker potential of mobile devices as tools for intrusion, insertion, data loss and other bad news. A huge source of info (and entertainment, for the professionally or avocationally paranoid) is AirTight Networks, which offers a full suite of solutions for enterprise WiFi (and now mobile device) intrusion prevention, scanning, and compliance and performance management.
At CSI 2010 on Oct. 28, AirTight demonstrated a new generation of smartphone-initiated and -mediated attacks against enterprise networks and data assets. Keystone of the demos is an attack AirTight developed and calls SmartPots (a trademarked term)—a mobile honeypot, terminating on a smart device and used to steal authentication credentials. The honeypot-as-attack-vector motif flip-flops the normal application of honeypot strategies as tools for intrusion and malware detection. For an early description of potentials in the latter case, a paper called "SmartPot—Creating a 1st Generation Smartphone Honeypot," by Michael Freeman and Andrew Woodward of Edith Cowan University and published in the Proceedings of the 7th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, is available here.
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