Email Seen As Biggest Security Hole For Mobile Devices: Survey

Email vulnerabilities represent the greatest source of risk for mobile devices, according to a recent survey by Good Technology.

The company surveyed 600 IT professionals about their concerns with the widespread use of handheld computing. Of those questioned, 79% considered email to be the biggest security threat. Another 26% regarded corporate intranet applications to be the greatest vulnerability.

"The enterprise mobile email and handheld computing markets have grown exponentially over the past five years. But this growth has created a corresponding surge in security vulnerability over the same time period," Rick Osterloh of Good Technology said in a statement.

Firewall vulnerability is the most worrisome security issue, according to 48%. To respond to this, 30% of the respondents said they were not likely to deploy a wireless solution that requires opening firewall ports, making perimeter security a top priority when selecting a mobile email solution. Handheld security was cited by 29% of respondents.

The survey also indicated 59% will not deploy a solution that does not encrypt data on a device. Remote control of password policy is essential to 55% of the respondents, and only 18% are comfortable with simple user name and password authentication. In addition, 57% think that it is essential to be able to wirelessly specify applications that must be present on the device.The companies surveyed felt strongly about these issues, but most do not have standard operating procedures to address them. Only 53% are currently able to enforce security and password policies consistently on devices without end-user dependency and 70% do not have an automated mechanism to determine which applications mobile users have on their devices.