Lookout
n.wright@primenetuk.com 29 May 2020
Literally ... Lookout! As Covid-19 has driven us all to “work from anywhere”, and typically anywhere becomes our home, the likelihood increases that you will be using your own personal mobile to access corporate email or check the diary for that webinar invitation this afternoon. We’ve all done it, usually to be seen to be more effective, and the justification is that you are on the case at home or simply that you have no other means.
The chances of you downloading malware to your personal mobile phone or tablet is massive, even more so now. Cyber criminals have sharpened their pencils and have focused more than ever on home workers who may well be sitting on unsecure networks using their own laptops and personal phones to work remotely rather than be furloughed.
A lot of corporate users may already have company devices and will probably be all nicely encapsulated in the company Mobile Device Management (MDM) software - Microsoft’s Intune springs to mind, but there are many. MDMs effectively set up a second device within the device and run all the corporate apps inside this “Walled Garden”. Think of it like a virtual machine working on physical machine. The corporate MDM will be able to set a security policy on the device and manage the ability to push applications and updates on applications etc. Which is all well and good, but if the user is sent a Phishing email (check out our blog on Phishing here) or they attempt to accidently download something they shouldn’t then the MDM cannot respond to the attack.
There is also no antivirus installed; “But mobiles don’t need antivirus” is something I hear a lot. The user often thinks that mobile phones have invincibility to attacks. “I only download stuff from the Play store, so I’m safe” is also a thought that lulls the user into a false sense of security. But look at it this way, my Pixel 3xl has more computer power than the average laptop did 5 years ago, so it’s like walking round with a £1,000 laptop in your back pocket. Now, you would put antivirus on your personal laptop, wouldn’t you?? So why not the beast in your back pocket? In my mind there is only one product on the market today with such a vast back catalogue of malicious malware and apps that just can’t be rivaled, and that’s Lookout. I fundamentally believe that every mobile device or tablet running on an internet connection should have as a bare minimum a free version of Lookout installed. Yes, it’s a scaled down version but it’s free. Go do it now and protect yourself! The fact that the app has 100 Million+ downloads in the Play store alone says to me that it’s a good thing.
Lookout are a privately owned oasis of security. Trust is a core pillar of their business and as a result they don’t collect any user data and yet still offer real-time threat detection across Cloud-based, Web-based and Application-based content.
Now back in June 2018 Garner predicted “over 80% of worker tasks will take place on a mobile device by 2020."
- Gartner, "Prepare for Unified Endpoint Management to Displace MDM and CMT" June 2018
They weren’t wrong..
Did you know that corporate mobile devices are 50% more likely to be phished than BOYD.
Did you also know 1 in 50 corporate mobiles are Phished daily! Yeah Daily!
With the covid-19 pandemic forcing us all to work form anywhere, doesn’t that raise alarm bells even to a small company of say 20 who are all forced to work from home? You could lose your whole business to a ransomware attack initiated from a malicious phishing link or download a sideloaded application setting up a man in the middle attack, all originating from an unprotected phone. I face palm at the thought, it could all be very different. Taking the issue of mobile device security one step further, you may like to offer Lookout mobile security to your employees in a managed but in a non-intrusive way. If so, Lookout for Business is the way to go.
- It is effectively GDPR complaint out of the box. It doesn’t collect any data from the user’s device, which is something an MDM does
- It’s the best and only solution that I am aware of that enables companies who allow personal mobiles usage on a corporate device anonymity but total protection (no one wants their boss to know what they do with their private phone, but your boss wants to sleep well knowing the company emails and data are not at risk)
- It can talk to any corporate MDM and allow automatic rules/action in case of a security bridge (for the ones who mix business and personal mobile usage). But can also sit in a standalone mode, fully managed centrally, protecting the device from every conceivable realtime threat for as little as £5.00 advice
- The free version is nice but as I mentioned, it is scaled down and doesn’t offer the full range of protection other than antivirus. In Lookout for Business you have the full suite of protection.
Including application, network, and device threats and with a proprietary dataset of over 170 million devices and 70 million analysed applications, you can deliver immediate detection and protection against both known and unknown threats. When you deploy Lookout for Small Business, you will protect your customers from:
- Trojans and spyware that can exfiltrate data from the device
- Vulnerabilities in app data transfer and storage
- Advanced root or jailbreak detection for Android and iOS devices
- Users with out-of-date operating systems
- Malicious WiFi networks that launch Man-in-the-middle attacks