Default Password? No Thank You!

Have you ever been in a location where you need Internet access and you use your mobile phone as a Personal or Portable Hotspot.  Essentially you use your mobile phone's Internet connection as a WIFI for your laptop or other devices.

Upon setting this up initially, you might find that your device will provide you with a password to use. How convenient! However, you might give consideration before making use of that connection.

In a recent test, researchers found that the list of words selected for these default passwords was little under 2000, and with equipment that could try 390,000 guesses per second, were able to crack the password in under a minute.

Have you evaluated your password recently ? How secure is your password ? Social networking is an open book when it comes to your life, is your password made up of names of places or children or maiden names - things that could easily be guessed from the locations of your photos, or list of children you mention in your posts?

Why not see how secure your password methodology is? Follow the link below and try out a few passwords to see just how secure they are:-

http://password.social-kaspersky.com/en

Certainly consider changing any default password that your device thinks up. Why not put THAT password in the web site above and see just how secure it is?

BYOD

With mobile technology becoming more and more accessible to the general user and the advancement of such technology over the years, it's not uncommon to see people taking their tech into work with them or using such technology instead of work issued equipment.

BYOD or Bring Your Own Device has steadily become a bit of a nightmare for IT Departments because staff are keen to use their devices through work networks, but as ownership of the equipment belongs to the user and not the company, it becomes hard to impose restrictions upon the levels in which the user may gain access.

Is there an answer? Not an immediate or clear one, no. The reason is that staff want access but don't want their equipment touched by the IT team and the IT team don't want the users to have unchecked access or confidential work data on a personal device.

There are a few options:-

• Have a "Use our equipment or nothing" policy. This will cost the company a little more if technology is required. It will also mean that the user may possibly carry around two phone devices, but the security control on the work device remains under the control of the company.
• Allow personal devices within the workplace and hook them onto an independent WiFi router which bypasses the main network, keeping the two separate.
• Allow personal devices to be used, but maintain a strict watch over what kind of company information is accessible to those users

I don't think that there is a perfect scenario. Each company will have to make a decision on the trust and size of their personnel, but with a bit of planning and ensuring that policies are in place, BYOD can be beneficial to all.