Does your company provide employees with cell phones or smartphones to use for business calls? If so, you may need to watch out for a big security concern.
A recent UK survey of companies and institutions revealed that 79% of employees conduct confidential conversations by cell phone, and 51% do so on a daily basis. However, only 18% of companies had security software in place on their phones.
Even businesses that carefully secure other communications may be unaware of the issue. Most people are used to making calls from standard, wired telephones, where security isn’t that big of an issue (unless the police or the FBI are wiretapping you). But cell phone signals can be picked up far more easily.
Cell phone service providers do provide some encryption with their services, but it is highly vulnerable.
What this means for your business is that such critical details as sales discounts, planned bids and sales leads, which are often discussed via cell phone, might fall into your rivals’ hands.
Problems could stem from a lack of communication between IT and management. If IT isn’t aware of what sort of calls are being made on the company-owned equipment, they may neglect to take proper security measures.
It’s important for IT to know what company-issued phones are being used for. That way, they can increase protection on the phone, if necessary.
