Cybersecurity professionals lax with their own security

Results from an on-site survey conducted at the digital security RSA Conference in the US last week show many IT professionals are lax with their own security when it comes to wearable technology.

US company Centrify conducted the on-site survey, polling over 100 randomly chosen conference IT delegates on the prevalence of wearables in the enterprise. The company, which was founded in 2004, deals with securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises.

Centrify believes the survey results show wearables may pose an increasing IT security risk considering 69% of wearable device owners say they forego login credentials, such as PINs, passwords, fingerprint scanners and voice recognition to access their devices — even though 42% of wearable owners claim identity theft as their top security concern when it comes to their devices.

Around 56% of wearable owners said they use their devices to access business apps such as Box, Slack, Trello, Dropbox, Salesforce, Google Docs, Microsoft Office or a combination of those, while one of their main security concerns includes a lack of IT management and device control (34%).

Approximately 22% of respondents cite a general increase in breaches of sensitive work data or information as another main security concern.

“As wearables become more common in the enterprise, IT departments must take serious steps to protect them as carefully as they do laptops and smartphones,” said Bill Mann, chief product officer for Centrify.

“Wearables are deceptively private. Owners may feel that due to their ongoing proximity to the body, they’re less likely to fall into the wrong hands.

“However, hackers don’t need to take physical possession of a device in order to exploit a hole in security. The best news is that solutions already exist that can easily wrap wearables into the identity management picture.”

The RSA Conference took place in San Francisco from 29 February to 4 March with a major focus on encryption.

The event included a sold-out exhibition, with nearly 700 IT speakers from the worlds of technology and government taking part in the conference program.

Image courtesy of Cindy Shebley under CC-BY-2.0.

Originally published here.