Unpacking the business and personal risks of digital mobile in Aotearoa

iPhone, Android, Blackberry. If you are a working professional in the business world, you would undoubtedly have come across these things. 

Perhaps you’ve been given one as a work phone for your company, or have decided to buy one for your personal use. Either way, it’s become abundantly clear that our lives have become dependent on this type of technology, in both a business and personal sense.

With cell phones being used for dual purposes, inherent risks are also involved. The mix of sensitive data and personal information and activity is dangerous, particularly if people aren’t careful about what they do online.

This begs the question of how safe we really are on our phones. Should Kiwis practice better smartphone security, and are they one swipe or tap away from a colossal data breach?

Famously, many prominent smartphone apps and programs have been systematically hacked by exploiting their key features. In the professional world, a notable example of this was the infamous Uber app hack in 2016, which resulted in 57 million users having their information across all mobile devices.

The risk is real, and with the increased undertaking of hybrid and remote work, hackers have an even bigger opportunity to steal data from a range of new networking and content making apps installed on smartphones. To add to this, there is the heightened risk of a breach through means such as IP addresses, fake apps and cookies through Safari or Google.

A damning statistic in Proofpoint’s 2020 State Of The Phise Report revealed that before the pandemic, 90% of respondents globally said they used employer-issued devices for personal activities. In addition, 32% of working adults were unfamiliar with Virtual Private Network (VPN) services. The findings also revealed a significant knowledge gap, where only 61% of these adults correctly identified examples of phishing and understood the term. Both of these subjects are some of the most common security threat related terms for device users.

In the subsequent 2021 report, more than 50% of respondents indicated they used a hybrid work scenario, and through this, there were further indications that work phones are still being widely used for a…