Today almost any item is connectable to your computer. Whether it is a camera, an MP3 player, a mobile phone or something else you can connect it to your computer. Useful and effective, but a great threat to security. Hackers can easily take advantage of this new world of connectable devices.

Connectable devices can easily be exploited by IT criminals. The users of these devices are more careless with theses kind of devices and they do not separate between work and spare time. MP3 players, smart phones and cameras are actually posing a great threat to an organisation/business if they are being exposed by hackers. According to a recent study 88 percent of all malware discovered in the last quarter of 2005 was related to cyber crime, meaning that the creators of malware have financial motives. The report also concludes that 54 percent of all malware during that period was Trojans, which indicates an increase compared to earlier.

There are different ways to stay protected against these threats, full scale monitoring can be necessary in many occasions, but it is also possible to implement actions in real time that prevents sensitive data from getting in the wrong hands. If you install or use endpoint security you can easily get control over all files leaving the network, when this happens and who is performing it. You can decide for yourself what kind of policy you want to implement and what kind of specific measures you want to take.

There are hundreds of malicious programs that might be potential threats to hand held devices. Having that in mind it can be smart to deactivate wireless networks, GPRS and 3Gs while they are connected to the corporate network. A corporation may also benefit from having a log that can be checked and controlled for incidents that are not in harmony with the settings and policies.

As always any organisation or company has to make priorities in order to decide what kind of security measures they want to implement or what actions needs to be taken. It is not always necessary with the most heavy and expensive defence systems. The most important is that they analyse and carefully consider how much they can take and what consequences that could occur in case of security breaches. A passive log in application may be a good start in order to get an overview over the actual threat picture and to see what actually happens in the corporation.