By Guido Ronchetti, CTO – XTN Cognitive Security
THE PROBLEM
Nowadays, everyone goes around with their smartphone in their pockets or bags. We use it for multiple purposes, ranging from social media to online payments. This means our phone is continuously accumulating sensitive personal data that could be quite valuable for fraudsters.
For these reasons, you would expect everybody to set extreme security measures to protect their devices: passwords, full disk encryption, and biometrics.
Instead, I found out the number of customers who still do not care about their safety and pretty scary.
At XTN, we daily monitor, for our clients, millions of consumer-facing mobile apps.
What we noticed is that 25% of mobile devices haven’t set the passcode.
That means one phone every four can be easily accessed by anybody, not just by the owner.
Honestly, this percentage surprised me because I would have expected a lower rate.
CONSIDERATIONS
If you are part of this 25 % who thinks that setting a passcode is a useless burden you should read this few considerations:
- If you lose your phone, everyone could instantly access your personal information. Did you ever think that most of these also involve your friends and family? And what about your social media accounts? Last but not least, they could also have access to your banking balance too. That could be a severe issue, especially if, hopefully, for you, you have a lot of money.
- Many encryption functionalities provided by your phone will be weakened or voided if you don’t set a passcode. All your cache data saved by apps in the device storage will be accessible, not only if the device is stolen but also if a device backup is available to the attacker.
- Anyone around could grab your phone and do whatever they want. Maybe a jealous lover will install spying apps, or a fraudster will authorize payment transactions on your behalf.
OUR MISSION
These are just a few examples to explain to you why you’re making the wrong choice.
The solution is simple: set up a passcode for your device. Do you want a better user experience? Just activate the biometric features provided by your phone!
XTN takes care of the security of mobile devices. We don’t want your data to be stolen in any way.
That’s why we provide companies with powerful security solutions to manage fraud and risks of mobile devices.
