You have a new device. Be it of any kind. Desktop, laptop, mobile devices. Everything is fine and good until the device starts to act up. You have found every possible general reasoning and inspection. Nothing seems to fix it.
Chances are, the device is infected with malware and virus.
Nature of malware on mobile devices
Now when it comes down to the mobile device. Malware exposes an interesting issue. The nature of the tightly controlled operating system and apps leaves the malware away and quite impossible to infect the device on operating systems like iOS and Windows Phone devices. In case malware manages to sneak in, operating system developers provide patching/OS updates in a period, which automatically updates the device and patches.
Unfortunately, Android devices do not come in with such tight security integration, probably due to their open source and highly modifiable nature. But to fill the lack, there are plenty of third-party antivirus and anti-malware apps out there. They come in for single-user or enterprise-level users.
When default anti-malware system is not enough?
Typically, your mobile’s default anti-malware system is supposed to suffice enough. Yet, they are not always quite right and may fail to detect some sneaky ones. This is incredibly true for Android devices due to their nature of making their system-wide openly modifiable by anyone. Therefore, their countless vendors out there with the modification of their own.
The one-size-fits-all kind of anti-virus or anti-malware would not work on every Android device. In some cases, one solution may fail to safeguard, and multiple solutions may require keeping and building that extra layer of the guard for the different devices on the network, or different modules covering specific kinds of devices that may be available straight from the vendor, allows you to integrate with an enterprise-level anti-malware solution.
Whatever the case is, the most important aspect of enterprise-level anti-malware is the deliverance of timely updates to the services on the base of the routines.
Solutions like network access-control ensure that the devices are checked for the latest anti-malware signatures and get them updated if required as soon as they connect to the network. In case the device is user-managed, they need policy, network access-control, and other necessary technical solutions to make sure users are updating their own devices in time or have some automated process built up.
These little measures can save your company and personnel from tremendous loss, which may come in as irrecoverable if the infrastructure was not built on a such strong foundation.
Preventing data loss in mobile devices
Before we jump into the whole nitty-gritty of mobile devices, let’s get one thing right. The most useful way of dealing with the loss of a mobile device is when you know you can’t prevent it or escape it. I am going to spit out a harsh truth, you will lose your mobile device at least once in this lifetime. Hopefully, it is not the case for you, but a majority of people simply just lose it until they realize they lost it. Most are lucky and will find them, others simply don’t.
If you start with an assumption that the device will or may end up at the mercy or ignorance of strangers even once, the very obvious thing you should do is to guard up with a good passcode lock or screen lock and protect the device from getting accessed by anyone outside of you. Every device out there has some sort of screen lock or passcode lock settings.
If you have not done so, set such a method of lock right away. There is typically some common method of lock that will be available to you. Such as – password, PIN, pattern, fingerprint, facial recognition, fingerprint, and so on, so forth. A device with modern iOS and Android has full device encryption that protects internal storage. Even a person who takes the device apart and plans to extract some data from the internal storage won’t get the data they want. Their access will simply be blocked.