How is Mobile Technology & IoT Devices Affecting IT Security

Technology has changed the way we do business and it has become an essential part of modern commerce. Technology has become the need of every business. Not only they are using technology for marketing their product and providing the better support they are also expanding their presence to the digital world with e-commerce. For communication, business is using latest technologies like VoIP which provide more functionality to the organization and is more easier and faster than traditional communication system. Since every employee needs a computer for their job in the organization, some companies are also promoting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) on their organization, as it can reduce the cost of buying a new device and increase efficiency since employee are working on their own machine.

Although these new technologies have made the job easier and faster they possess several threats to the business. We can see smart IoT devices being installed on the organization to monitor the environment and to automate the controlling process, but these devices are being used by bad guys for their botnet. We have already heard a lot of times that hackers are using IoT devices to perform an attack like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

Not only this but these device stores a lot of information about the office environment so a small loophole on it might result in a data breach of the corporate. We can see a trend of BYOD in most of the offices these days to reduce the operating cost of business. Although they think that this is reducing the cost of business it might have a serious threat on the information system of the organization because it is quite difficult to enforce security policies on the machine that are not owned by the organization.

Business can't run without using such kind of technologies, there is a lot of competition and to stand above their competitor any business organization should use the latest technologies for their business. Since there is a chance that the use of those technologies might also pose threat to information security, we have to create proper plans and strategy to maintain the security of our assets. Therefore, security must be considered on the plans and it should be implemented properly.

Why should we stop using SMS-based two-factor authentication?

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Amar Bhattarai

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