Is your 50-something IT manager the last one to know about the company getting acquired?
An extremely obvious yet perhaps unpleasant observation for over-40 IT managers is that under 30 employees know a lot more about technology and ways to bypass the company security safeguards than they do.
A young, hip, mobile and techology-facile workforce may be a significant, yet unacknowledged vulnerability for companies. Your information security group is doing security awareness training and evaluating DLP solutions from companies like Symantec and Fidelis Security to block blogging and Facebook but the action has moved to Twitter.
Your physical security officer has installed security cameras to deter theft of equipment but how are they going to block smart cell phones with 16GB memory, cameras and modern Unix-based operating systems like OS/X (the OS on the Apple iPhone) that can run any nix* application. How about this exploit – download some data to your phone from the PC and then ssh to a private sshd server somewhere on a virtual host. Don’t want to be tracked down ? No problem – just take down the virtual host after your’e finished – don’t neeed more than an hour or so.
What about data loss by text messaging? True – it’s limited by the quantity – but not by the quality.
I’m waiting for commercial applications of cell-phone blocking technology to the workplace – in this down market – it might be critical for the guys and gals in the board room.