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More Potential Dangers of BYOD

July 13, 2017

On July 11, 2017, Microsoft ended support of Windows Phone 8.1. Not that there are a lot of Windows Phone 8.1 users out there, but it highlights another issue with using unsupported technology, especially in the business environment. I've never been a big fan of BYOD (Bring Your Own Disaster) and even less so these days. When you allow employees to connect their personal devices to the company network, there is a risk of data compromise because they haven't installed the latest updates, are running unsupported software or already have an infected device.

A lot of SMB (Small Medium Business) companies don't have technology to monitor and control the BYOD movement. If you use an Exchange server, you can use some of the policies within Active Sync to enforce such things as passwords, encryption and remote wipe criteria.

Unless you have something in place that tells you when an employee connects a non-supported OS mobile device to your network, you're at risk. What if someone doesn't want to upgrade their iPhone to a hardware platform that supports the latest version of iOS? Android users are just as guilty and don't want to pay money to get hardware that will run the current supported versions of the Android OS.

If you aren't spending money on a MDM (Mobile Device Manager) that identifies outdated and unsupported operating systems, you may want to consider implementing some alternate methods. As an example, the 2FA (two factor authentication) system from Duo will identify devices that are running unsupported operating systems. Bottom line…know what is being connected to your network.

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Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
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