Establishing a Mobile Security Strategy

According to McAfee, the research clearly indicates that mobile operators are concerned with the impact of mobile security on their business. Almost 80 per cent cited impact on public relations or their brand as of high concern, closely followed by the loss of credibility in the reliability of new services – a crucial issue as operators seek to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and lifetime value in maturing markets.

Despite the fact that most mobile operators are experiencing mobile security incidents and are concerned with its future impact, the research also highlights a large gap between the kind of protection operators consider important and that which they actually deploy. Less than one-third of the operators who consider application and device-level protection important actually deploy protection at these levels. Furthermore, although fewer operators consider network level protection important, more than half deploy protection at this level.

In line with the growing importance of mobile security to service providers, 85 per cent of those questioned plan to increase their mobile security budgets to tackle issues including network intrusion, mobile viruses, denial-of-service attacks, spam and mobile phishing (SMiShing).

“This research clearly demonstrates that mobile security is moving quickly up the industry agenda with the number of malware incidents rising and more time and money being dedicated to resolving mobile security issues,” said Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president of McAfee Mobile Security. “As mobile data use and functionality proliferates and mobile operators around the world are transforming their businesses from airtime revenue models to transaction-based and content-centric businesses, security is becoming an essential enabler for the success of new revenue-generating services.” (Source)