Monkey see - monkey take photo: the risk of mobile information leakage

Renaud, K. and Goucher, W. (2013) Monkey see - monkey take photo: the risk of mobile information leakage. International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism, 3(4), pp. 40-51. (doi: 10.4018/ijcwt.2013100105)

Abstract

Mobile devices have diffused through the global population with unprecedented rapidity. This diffusion has delivered great benefits to the populace at large. In the third world people living in rural areas are now able to contact family members who live in other parts of the country for the first time. For the city-dweller the mobile device revolution has brought the ability to communicate and work on the move, while they travel to and from work, or between meetings, thus making ertswhile “dead” time more productive. It is trivial, nowadays, to utilise workplace functionality, and access confidential information, outside the four walls of the organisation's traditional boundaries. Data now moves across organisational boundaries, is stored on mobile devices, on USB sticks, and in emails, and also stored in the cloud. Organisations have somehow lost control over their data. This mobility and lack of control undeniably creates the potential for information leakage that could hurt the organisation. The almost ubiquitous camera-equipped mobile phones exacerbate the problem. These feature-rich phones change the threat from mere Shoulder Surfing into Visual Information Capture. Information is now no longer merely observed or overheard but potentially captured and retained without the knowledge of the person working on said documents in public. The first step in deciding how to manage any risk is to be able to estimate the extent and nature of the risk. This paper seeks to help organisations to understand the risk related to mobile working. We will model the mobile information leakage risk, depicting the factors that play a role in exacerbating and encouraging the threat. We then report on two experiments that investigated the vulnerability of data on laptops and tablet devices to visual information capture. The authors address both capability and likelihood (probability) of such leakage. The results deliver insight into the size of the Mobile Information Leakage risk. The following stage in this research will be to find feasible ways of mitigating the risk.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Goucher, Wendy and Renaud, Professor Karen
• Authors: Renaud, K., and Goucher, W.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Journal Name: International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism
• Publisher: IGI Global
• ISSN: 1947-3435
• ISSN (Online): 1947-3443