Why mobile data security matters

FCW -- Mobile -- March 15 2016Keeping employees from using their personal mobile devices at work is a losing battle — and it’s challenging agencies to come up with new ways to secure government data

 

According to a recent survey conducted by Lookout,  50 percent of feds use personal mobile devices to access their  work email, and 49 percent download work documents to personal  devices. Unfortunately, those devices aren’t as secure as they could be.

Eleven percent of mobile devices associated with government networks have had “serious mobile threat encounters,” and 18 percent of federal employees said  that that they have encountered  malware on their personal government-issued smartphones, according to Lookout. About  seven percent of federal employees said they jailbreak or  root the devices they use for work, which could expose them to unpatched vulnerabilities and malware.