Going Mobile, Keeping Secure: Security Startups, New Products Amp Up the Protection

In a year that started with Target cleaning up its holiday mess the retailer revealed that more than 70 million customers had their credit card information stolen by hackers, a crime that could cost the company upwards of $400 million and the CEO his job followed with cyber-breach-of-the-week regularity (were looking at you, JP Morgan and Home Depot), security concerns are keeping IT professionals in a state ofanxiety.When asked about project priorities, IT pros put security at or near the top of the list. AnInformationWeeksurvey of IT executivesfound 88% have security initiatives and major implementation projects planned for the next year or two.

While enterprise-wide security is top-of-mind, dealing with mobile app security issues is a close second. Whether its instituting controls over employee smartphones and tablets, mobilizing a line of business and consumer-facing applications, or exploiting the unique capabilities of mobile devices like geo-location data, image and position sensors, and touch interfaces, without opening up Pandoras Box,mobile app security is a priority for businesses large and small. Ubiquitous availability is needed to improve business operations and develop new revenue sources, so applifying the business is an IT imperative. In the sameInformationWeeksurvey,80%of respondentssay they plan to build mobile apps, while 58% are deploying tablets. Others will use off-the-shelf options.

Follow the Money, Securitys Hot

With the intersection of mobility and security teaming to represent a defining challenge for this generation of IT leaders, its only natural that mobile security attracts more than its share of startup talent and venture capital. Last summer,Lookout, a developer of one of the first consumer-oriented smartphone security apps,landed $150 millionto fund expansion into the enterprise market. This comes on top of earlier funding rounds from a whos who of Silicon Valley VCs totaling $130 million. Other startups likeBluebox,Nok Nok LabsandWickrhave raised tens of millions in venture funding this year alone. Money like that clearly shows that security is a critical piece of the mobile ecosystem and economy.

But Lookout and similar client-side security suites like BitDefender, McAfee, Sophos, TrustGo and many others (indeed,AV-TESTevaluated no fewer than 36 Android appsin itslastedreview) represent an old school approach to user security, an adaptation of bloated PC security suites, better known for bogging down systems and missing the latest zero-day threat, to Android devices.Perversely, iPhone users, which arewell represented in management ranks, are unaffectedby this fast-growing software phenomenon. Apples tight control over the OS greatly limits what individual apps can do, while its curated App Store means most client-side security software, which often acts as a Trojan Horse for actual malware, filters out many products, meaning theres no need or market for such software. In fact, despite its familiarity, an extension of the decades-old PC protection scheme, the client-side security suite is the least interesting of mobile security product categories.

Mobile Security Taxonomy

Innovation in mobile security is happening on several fronts, with new products falling into several logical categories:

I hope toexamine each in more detail over the coming months, but the easiest to understand liein the area of authentication. Everyone knows that passwords are terribly insecure, particularly in the careless way most users choose and reuse them, but password vaults like 1Password, Dashlane and LastPass provide a convenient and secure way of generating, storing, managing and synchronizing strong, hard-to-crack passwords. Each acts like a safety deposit box for usernames and passwords, storing the actual values behind in a fortified, encrypted database.

Source: Wikipedia

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Going Mobile, Keeping Secure: Security Startups, New Products Amp Up the Protection