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PrivacyCase – Smartphones in the business environment:

Trusted Tool or Trusted Threat?

When a business allows the regular use of cellular phones in the workplace, the first thought is
that by doing so the business empowers the employee and boosts their productivity.

After all, today’s smartphones can provide a near-virtual office on the go. Constant connectivity
via text and email, teleconferencing, the ability to upload and download documents easily, the
list is endless of how many ways smartphones enable employees to stay on the job no matter
where they are and at any time of day.

What most businesses don’t realize is that by allowing the regular use of cellular phones in the
business environment, sensitive and critical information related to their operations is put at risk.
Every major business will say that information security is a top priority, yet allowing the regular
use of cellular phones in the business environment can severely undermine that priority without
the proper security measures in place.

Every function that makes these devices useful can also be infiltrated in a variety of ways; the
smarter the phone, the more ways it can be used for surveillance. Eavesdropping on
conversations on or off the phone; downloading, sending and deleting sensitive documents, the
ability to read, copy and forward email, even visual spying in real time, Wi-Fi snooping and more
can be done with surprising ease and relatively little cost. Such infiltration can lead to alarming
amounts of information gathering that poses a serious threat to the proprietary information of a
business.

In fact, the microphone can be open virtually all time which enables eavesdropping on face-to-
face conversations. One underappreciated example of this would be in newer phones with a
Droid OS; all that’s needed to wake up the phone is to speak “Ok, Google” into it. Bottom line,
devices and facilities need to be secured from this threat.

Downloadable “cell phone spy-ware” is easily found on the internet and can be priced as low as
twenty-dollars; more expensive programs can even be remotely installed. Using these
programs, a phone spy can take over the phone and do whatever they want with the stored data
in addition to using the phone’s microphone, GPS, camera and every other function on the
device they attack. Information stored on smartphones can be retrieved, collected, transmitted
and removed from the targeted device via any connection to it, whether it’s a cell tower, a radio
connection or an internet connection.

Your cell phone can spy on you just because it’s in the same room with you, you don’t have to
be using it. Cell phone spy-ware as well as downloaded applications installed on a smartphone
can use the devices various sensors including the camera and microphone to perform
surveillance; all of which can be recorded. These types of software packages are the lowest
cost and simplest way to attack a phone; including more expensive versions which can be

8 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – October 2014 Edition
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