The Country Manager, Checkpoint Nigeria, Mr. Rommy Okonkwo, speaks to OZIOMA UBABUKOH about how mobile viruses are corrupting companies’ emails and sites, among other issues
Phones have become very vulnerable to attacks today. In a society like Nigeria, how can phone hacking be checked?
It is our role to check the activities of cybercriminals, which cut across every aspect – all the verticals. What are the devices and equipment that are being used across these verticals? For instance, in the banking sector, you have employees of the bank using their laptops, desktops and then some organisations within the banking sector also provision emails via mobile devices like the telephone, iPad and Android. So, as a leading cybersecurity vendor, we have decided to stay one step ahead of what our competitors are doing by leading technology across all of these areas. For mobile devices, we specifically have a solution today, which we call the mobile security. We have come to understand that this piece of device, called ‘mobile device’ today, controls almost everything you and I do. You could imagine you were a bank and you provision emails on this, they call it BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. We have this today in our own environment. In the West, people say, ‘Don’t use company equipment; bring your own device (BYOD)’. For instance, if you have a mobile phone, you can actually be able to access the network through the mobile device. But the question is, if your mobile device has a malware or is infected by a virus, and you come into the organisation and logged in with the same credentials, what will happen if this particular device is not protected is that you probably will infect the organisation through your own device. And this is exactly where Checkpoint plays a very vital role. For us, we have a technology, as I said earlier, called mobile security; this is what we do. So, we control access; and we control what people do through this device. We make sure that you get into the corporate environment of an organisation with a very clean device or tool such that you don’t infect whatever the organisation has set in place for corporate work.
There is still a lot of anti-virus in the market today. Could it be that the security measures against cybercrime are not working?
It is not that the security measures are not working; I think it boils down to awareness. The fact remains that if you look at a common person on the streets, he does not know that there is a need for him to protect his mobile device. What happens today is that people use it for social media and other things. Again, it is also a very strong vector for infection or bringing in malware into a corporate organisation. Many people do not believe that this particular device needs to be controlled in terms of what it is used for. The awareness is key. Except in the corporate environment, people who work in the banking sector, oil and gas and telecommunication companies are very much aware that all-round protection is key even when you have provided all the protection on all other areas like the desktops and other work tools within the organisation. They are aware that when you provision an email via the device, if you do not protect the device against all of those viruses like malware; it could also be a means through which the organisation can get infected. And this is actually why for us we have a special technology for mobile devices that can run on desktops. The beauty of it is that if my device is infected today and then I get into the network, I have a tool that can immediately send an alert or give me a signal that a particular application that I am trying to open is malicious. And that it is not right for me to get into the organisation with the device if that malicious file is not deleted. Today, we have a technology that detects when a malicious file exists in an organisation.
As an expert, do you think it was proper for the United States Government to have sued Apple when the latter insisted that it would not lock an iPhone that belonged to suspected criminals?
Frankly speaking, I think the laws that guide Americans could have informed their (the US government) decision to do that. What I think probably happened was that they felt if they went ahead to unlock that particular phone, it probably would become a trend. Tomorrow, somebody else is going to come, and it could be an infringement on the rights of people. It was a similar case to the Israeli company that was hacked and it did not take them hours to break that particular phone. So, for the US, I think it has to do with the legal rights of people.
It has been said that with the use of cloud, cybercrime issues will be reduced. In what ways could cloud be adopted in mobile technology?
I am aware that today in Nigeria; many organisations have started hosting their emails in the cloud. That is actually the direction for everyone to go. Corporate organisations today provision their emails on the cloud. Now, the question is that if I work for a corporate organisation that has my email in the cloud and then the same organisation also provisions emails via the mobile device, it means that for me to access my corporate emails, I have to go via the cloud. So, there is more like a correlation between the mobile device and the cloud solutions. As I said, a typical bank or a telecommunications firm, or an oil company that has their emails in the cloud and then the employees are provisioned to access their corporate emails via the mobile device, there is no other place you have to do that; it is still the same cloud solution.Copyright PUNCH.
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