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How Risky Behaviors Hurt Shadow IT Security

By Sue Marquette Poremba, Posted December 12, 2016

  • How Risky Behaviors Hurt Shadow IT Security

    How Risky Behaviors Hurt Shadow IT Security-

    Don't Forget About Social Media Applications

    "While not often mentioned in discussions around shadow IT, we shouldn't forget that hugely popular applications like Twitter, Facebook and Skype are risky applications to add to a user's device. These three applications alone are responsible for a significant amount of malware and information leakage, albeit almost unintentional," says Absolute's Global Security Strategist, Richard Henderson.

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How Risky Behaviors Hurt Shadow IT Security

By Sue Marquette Poremba, Posted December 12, 2016
  • 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
  • How Risky Behaviors Hurt Shadow IT Security-11

    Don't Forget About Social Media Applications

    "While not often mentioned in discussions around shadow IT, we shouldn't forget that hugely popular applications like Twitter, Facebook and Skype are risky applications to add to a user's device. These three applications alone are responsible for a significant amount of malware and information leakage, albeit almost unintentional," says Absolute's Global Security Strategist, Richard Henderson.

Shadow IT is the use of assets that don't fall under the management of the IT department, and, says Phil Richards, CSO of LANDESK, it can be a huge security problem, especially for those companies that don't have a strong IT department to monitor application and device use, or when policies are too restrictive to allow employees to do their work efficiently. "The existence and growth of shadow IT is usually a sign that the central IT organization is not meeting the needs of the business," says Richards. This means too many employees are going rogue to do their work.

This is putting both the network and its data at risk. For example, Symantec's Shadow Data Report analyzed the business readiness of over 15,000 cloud apps and services based on more than 60 security criteria. The result was that only 1 percent of these apps were found secure enough for business use. Many apps and services are already a security risk, but when they are used as shadow IT, the potential threats go unchecked.