Making Your End User Devices Secure

With the growing use of laptop devices in organisations, there comes the inevitable increased risk of your IT infrastructure being breached from external nasties or for your valuable corporate data being stolen.

In our opinion, the main four areas that you need to guard against are as follows:

Threat 1 – Pod Slurpers & Thumbsuckers
This is where direct connectivity through removable storage devices are used to either directly infect the end-user laptop or to maliciously extract data from the laptop. Sometimes dangerous things come in innocuous packaging: memory sticks, mp3 players, cameras and even printers can be infected and as such create issues when innocently plugged into the corporate laptop.

We advise that you tightly control connectivity to laptop devices and ensure that only secure connectivity is permitted.

Threat 2 – Unsecure Wireless Networking
Availability of WiFi hot-spots greatly improves mobility and workforce productivity, however, the growing number of bogus WiFi connections and laptop to laptop connectivity means we have to be cautious about what we connect to.

We advise that you centrally control when, how, and where users are allowed to connect to wireless networks.

Threat 3 – Lock-Down Data
If laptops or memory sticks get lost or stolen, this often exposes corporate data to falling into the wrong hands.

We recommend that you deploy encryption to ensure that even if data gets into the wrong hands, it cannot be read.

Threat 4 – Traditional Threats
Traditional threats from spyware and viruses have not gone away; they are getting more invasive and clever in their approaches.

As always, we recommend that you implement corporate class firewalls and virus protection to protect individual laptops and your corporate network.