Yesterday I saw something exciting online: a public mobile phone charging station. My first thought was: there is no easier way to get data! In this article you will learn more about the risks and how you can protect yourself and your data!
How does it all work?
In a restaurant, a gym or in a public place there are lockers with charging cables (USB/Lightning). There you can connect your smartphone and charge it unattended.
Quelle: Instagram / @implug.ch
This means that we connect our smartphone publicly to a cable whose other end is hidden from us. Is it even easier to make your data available to strangers? These systems are a real invitation for data thieves. How is an inexperienced user supposed to distinguish a serious charging station from a dubious one? Not at all!
Clearly: I don’t want to accuse serious providers like Implug of anything! But in general there is a possibility to access data from any device. Of course, access to the smartphone memory is not possible without confirmation, especially with iPhones, but since Vault7 we know that this is not 100% protection either.
In addition, there is of course the classic way of simply stealing the smartphone from the compartment. This can happen, for example, with a second key or simply enough violence. In both cases, we make it possible for a third party to simply access our smartphone with lots of information, both private and professional. Actually an ingenious system, isn’t it?
How can I protect myself from it?
The easiest thing, of course, is not to use these charging stations. But how can you make sure that your employees don’t use these stations? Not at all!
The only way to protect your data in this situation is to use technical means to prevent access to business critical data by third parties.
To protect your data from unauthorized access, a container application is the first and easiest step.
Access through this secure environment prevents business data from being shared through access to the device’s storage. All business data is stored in a specially encrypted area of the smartphone. Even if the device is stolen and an attacker has unrestricted access to the smartphone, a container requires considerably more effort to extract data.
The advantage for your employees is that business and private data are kept 100% separate from each other and there is no possibility of mixing.
[table id=2 /]
[table id=4 /]
