Mitigating security implications of bringing your own device in an enterprise environment

Abstract

The rapid growth in the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon, has resulted in the introduction of personal mobile devices in the Enterprise environment. The benefit derived from embracing BYOD in organisations is enhanced mobility of employees and the reduced equipment cost to Enterprises. An effective BYOD management is required to protect company data as diverse mobile devices are finding their way into the enterprise. Available mobile device statistics revealed that 52% of these devices are either lost or stolen worldwide, this becomes a major security concern amid risk of exposure of sensitive and important corporate data. The highlighted risks to the enterprises requires a solution to safeguard, reduce and attempt to mitigate security breaches. This research seeks to answer the following how intrusion detection is leading to increase in cybercrime? Rational look at security challenges for BYOD and how secure is BYOD? The rapid application development (RAD) methodology was applied in this research to prototype a scanning and detection technique to prevent or mitigate threats from BYOD to the enterprise environment. The developed application is a scanner and firewall that will be able to scan, monitor and mitigate malicious attacks on BYOD and present results of scanned devices, ports and blocked devices with a 95% accuracy.