Keeping employees from using their personal mobile devices at work is a losing battle — and it’s challenging agencies to come up with new ways to secure government data
According to a recent survey conducted by Lookout, 50 percent of feds use personal mobile devices to access their work email, and 49 percent download work documents to personal devices. Unfortunately, those devices aren’t as secure as they could be.
Eleven percent of mobile devices associated with government networks have had “serious mobile threat encounters,” and 18 percent of federal employees said that that they have encountered malware on their personal government-issued smartphones, according to Lookout. About seven percent of federal employees said they jailbreak or root the devices they use for work, which could expose them to unpatched vulnerabilities and malware.
