A general rule of thumb worth following: Any device that you can plug into the internet or a USB stick is going to be vulnerable, and the same goes for anything you might punch a password into. You know that you should keep your laptops, desktop computers and tablets safe, but you’re also going to want to spend some time thinking about software security when it comes to…
Phones
For a long time, people simply assumed that phones were impervious, but as we’re seeing more and more, this is not the case. There are more viruses for laptops and desktops than there are for smart phones simply because smart phones are newer, and hackers are still learning their way around the device.
Video Game Devices
Not so long ago, the only people hacking video game consoles were trying to remove region-lock so that they could play Japanese games that haven’t been released in the US. Now we have quite a bit of sensitive information on our Xboxes and Playstations, including payment information. There are plenty of stories out there of consoles being hacked for money.
Wearable Devices
A lot of the talk on wearable devices is still theoretical. People aren’t using augmented reality glasses as an every day device just yet, and the only people who are really on the cutting edge of this trend are the health-conscious, who use wearables to track their exercise progress. That doesn’t mean that these devices aren’t already vulnerable. Although your fitness records aren’t the most vulnerable data, there’s nothing stopping viruses from piggybacking on those devices and into others.
USB Thumb Drives
A report from PC World suggests that most thumb drives can be programmed to infect a computer without the user’s knowledge. Even if you use firewalls and web security, loaning someone your USB drive means that anything their computer has, your computer might catch. In some of these cases you have to admire the ingenuity a bit, such as the virus that uses your USB drive as a keyboard, taking manual access of your computer.
Some items are more vulnerable than others, but none are magic. Keep this in mind when securing your office networks, you want to ensure that everything from your printer to your fax machine to your employees’ smart phones are capable of holding up to cyber attacks, viruses, malware, and everything in between.
