Wandera, the provider of advanced mobile threat prevention and data usage optimisation for enterprises, announced the findings of its latest quarterly Mobile Data Report – an analysis of mobile security, data usage, trends and traffic patterns across 100,000 devices in 500 enterprises globally in Q2 2015 and the world’s first report that purely focuses on cellular data usage patterns.
Among the key findings highlighted in the Mobile Data Report, Wandera detected five times as many password leaks from apps on Samsung devices than on iPhones. However Samsung devices seem less vulnerable to spam and malware attacks than iPhones – twice as many of both were detected on the Apple devices in the period.
On a positive note, Wandera also found that HTTPS traffic – the secure network protocol – is on the rise across mobile networks, now making up 46% of all mobile browser traffic – an increase in the last 12 months of 7%.
“This report allows us to shine a light on areas of the industry that put enterprises at risk. The principle finding of this report was that apps on Samsung devices leak passwords five times more frequently than apps on iPhones. This really highlights the fragmentation of Android app stores,” said Eldar Tuvey, CEO of Wandera. “Enterprises remain unaware of so many of the specific risks of enterprise mobility, from man-in-the-middle attacks to Wi-Fi security and roaming bill shocks. Our aim with this report is to move IT departments’ understanding of these threats from the theoretical to the tangible and quantifiable.”
In the report, Wandera highlighted what it sees as the ‘weakest link in the chain’ – browser threats. Browser threats are commonly ignored by the mobile security community when it comes to mobile devices, yet Wandera believes that it is a vector for the next growth phase on mobile malware. In the report Wandera revealed the most visited malware sites by devices in its network are all on a .ru domain name.
Enterprise employees are also becoming more aware of the “bill shock” dangers of roaming, changing their mobile usage habits outside their “home” countries. As a proportion of all data usage, roaming only comprised 16% this quarter – a reduction of 2% compared to the end of 2014. The proportion of mobile video usage dropped from 16% and the top type of data usage domestically, to only 5% abroad and one of the lowest types; social network usage drops from 12% to 6%. However, unsurprisingly, mapping software is used 75% more when employees are out of the country.
Wandera also reported on the three instances of the highest “bill shock” in the past year as reported by its clients. Two occurred in France – the first was an example of Google Maps running in the background resulting in a bill of €8,000, while the second incurred €15,000 of charges just from photo sharing and accessing iCloud. Another user ran up a bill of £33,000 for video and music streaming while in the UK.
“While overall understanding of the roaming risk is improving, it only takes one error to incur massive charges and prove that bill shock still very much exists.” continues Tuvey, “Data compression and policy enforcement at home and abroad can not only save enterprises a significant amount of budget – it can also save the enterprise IT department from having to trust in staff understanding the risks of roaming. They don’t need to know which services rely on data, or resort to largely ineffective requests to staff to limit their data usage.”
The full Q2 2015 Mobile Data Report can be downloaded here – www.wandera.com/resources/mobiledatatrends.
