With Major breaches of Apple’s iCloud causing a stir in the media over the recent weeks, many people have been asking the question “Is anything safe?” Luckily, the answer is a resounding “YES.” While many users don’t bother to protect their phones from these attacks, there are security programs that can counteract the very exploits used by hackers over the past few months. SAP, partnered with VMware, has such protection in place for its applications.
The largest recent breach was actually not a weakness in Apple’s iCloud application, or a vulnerability in any application, but in the way that cell phones are actually designed to work. When an application runs, it sends certain information through a folder which is commonly shared by all applications on a phone. An exploit in the way this memory works allows a malicious, second application to hijack your main applications, and send information back to a hacker behind the scenes. Of course, this does rely on you downloading such an app, but these hackers are often very clever, hiding their malicious apps inside cloned versions of real apps that people download every day.
VMware’s AirWatch mobile management system is prepared to handle this very exploit. By isolating certain enterprise applications in their own “Content Locker,” AirWatch will safely keep sensitive data out of the hands of hackers. AirWatch also comes with a constant monitoring system which could rapidly identify the existence of malicious applications, and could even be set up to deny access to any corporate data when the device is possibly compromised.
SAP partnered with VMware to bolster its already strong mobile security. Now, new applications can be built utilizing all the security features that AirWatch offers, and that SAP has always offered, making SAP apps amongst the most secure. Also, thanks to SAP’s Mobile Place, systems will allow users to select AirWatch enabled applications and install them without needing to stop by the IT desk.
As we look at our mobility platforms, users need to verify that an enterprise mobility deployment is secure and personal and/or corporate information is protected with end-to-end security extending to users, devices, applications, content, data, email and networks. There are solutions that provide real-time device details and continuous compliance monitoring to ensure your devices and data are secure.
At the end of the day, having a mobile device security platform solution may not have spared any of the celebrities whose private data was stolen, as (presumably) none of them were using enterprise data applications, but if they did have an enterprise mobility security platform, it could have at the very least warned them about a malicious app. Moving forward, it is important to realize that these kinds of vulnerabilities do exist in our mobile devices, but there are ways to secure the important data, and SAP is trying its best to make that easy to do.