From 2006 to 2011, the “number of security breaches involving sensitive government data increased nearly eightfold,” reports the Baltimore Sun, something of an issue as more government workers telecommute and use their own laptops and mobile devices to complete projects and send e-mails.
The Sun reports:
Just more than half of federal employees who use a smartphone for work are using their own devices, according to a recent survey by an advocacy group called Mobile Work Exchange. But a third of those employees don’t protect their devices with passwords. And more than 60 percent said their agency doesn’t have a security policy in place.
The government does not track personal device usage. [more]
I think this article hightlight a very important point about BYOD and that it increases the chance of a cybersecurity threat creating a problem for the user or the organization, but there are standards an laws such as SOX and HIPAA that do help offer some protection. One of the biggest tools is education. Our hospital put a BYOD policy in place to use Tigertext for HIPAA complient text messaging, but the doctors still used their unsecure regular text messaging. Even though we had a good BYOD policy, it wasn’t enough, we had to bring each doctor in to admin for 15 minutes of training and explaining the HIPAA issues and how to use the app correctly. Now we have about 95% of the doctors in compliance. This has significently lowered the cybersecurity risks for the doctors and the hospital.