With mobile devices increasing in workplaces, enterprise mobile security is quickly becoming as important as physical security for your home or office.
Enterprises struggle to find a balance between enabling employees to be more productive with mobile devices while protecting sensitive information. Some enterprises hire entire teams of security operations experts just to secure mobile devices, and they still need to use the best technology available to fully protect their business.
But the overarching goal is to achieve both—productivity and security—without the expense of hiring robust security teams or deploying multiple security applications.
Table of contents:
The many threats to enterprise mobile security
Different apps, device models, and operating system versions have unique vulnerabilities. As a business’s device landscape scales to provide more functionality, so does the number and variety of threats it faces.
Common enterprise mobility threats
Unauthorized and malicious apps
Employees who download unauthorized apps on a company device—or on a personal device with access to company information—may introduce cybersecurity risks. Some apps can deceive even the most experienced users by mimicking safe, well-known programs.
Some mobile apps request permissions well beyond what they need to run, and then steal administrative details and data from users. Others install malware and exploit vulnerabilities in mobile operating systems, apps, and user behavior to infiltrate devices and networks.
Mobile phishing attacks
Mobile phishing attacks use “legitimate-looking” email messages, text messages, or voice calls to trick victims into sharing sensitive information. In some cases, victims are lured into downloading malware or ransomware, allowing hackers even more access to the victim’s device and confidential data. Enterprises are also at risk for "spear phishing attacks"— which target specific individuals or groups most often within an organization.
With the rise of generative AI models, phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated as hackers can use AI to improve scams, making them appear more legitimate through fewer grammatical and spelling errors.
Public Wi-Fi
Public Wi-Fi is the free Wi-Fi commonly found in airports, public transit, restaurants, libraries, and other public spaces. And, while common and convenient, these networks can leave enterprise mobile security vulnerable to online threats and cyberattacks.
Using public Wi-Fi networks comes with threats such as malware, identity theft and data interception. Threat actors can position themselves between a user and an application allowing them to intercept, or manipulate communications, potentially giving them full access to sensitive company information like secured data, credit card numbers, or login information.
Weak passwords
Weak passwords and the absence of two-factor authentication are among the greatest threats to enterprise cybersecurity. Hackers exploit weak passwords through brute-force attacks and phishing schemes, gaining access to default or easily guessed passwords.
When mobile devices with default passwords connect to the internet, threat actors can exploit these vulnerabilities using straightforward techniques like credential stuffing and password spraying to gain access.
These mobile threats come at a great cost to enterprises.
The financial cost of cybersecurity breaches
Data breaches are becoming more common, and the damage they can cause is staggering. IBM reports that the global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is over $4.88M US dollars, increasing 10% over last year.
An expense like that can spell doom for a business. Data breach prevention is therefore a must-have. To keep mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) down, and their data safe, enterprise security operations teams need a toolshed of solutions that are as robust and powerful as the threats facing them.
How Knox Suite can protect your devices
Samsung devices already come with protection however the Knox security platform takes built-in mobile device security a step further by bringing government-grade security to all enterprise devices.
As an added layer of protection, Knox Suite leverages the built-in security to provide managed security through advanced features. Let’s look at how Knox Suite can make life better for IT administrators and SecOps teams through reliable mobile device security management.
Easily find and address vulnerabilities
IT admins are tasked with casting an eagle eye over system weaknesses in their device landscape—vulnerabilities that hackers target for attacks. They play an essential role in proactively hunting down and addressing these vulnerabilities to avoid costly attacks.
Operating systems (OS) are just one aspect IT admins will need to be wary of. They often ask these key security questions to ensure mobile device security best practices:
- What security patch level are my devices currently on?
- Have any critical vulnerabilities been discovered in our current OS version?
- Which devices require security patches to mitigate the vulnerabilities I’ve found in my fleet?
Knox Suite has made it easy to answer these questions thanks to its Security Center and powerful OS version control.
Centralized Security Center
Knox’s Security Center does all of the lengthy, tedious groundwork of identifying and managing vulnerabilities within your business’s device fleet.
Security Center unlocks a comprehensive view of your Fleet vulnerabilities. Here, intelligent charts reveal the number of problems by their severity.
Safety Centre
With the help of the Security Center, you can pinpoint the exact devices with detected vulnerabilities but outdated security patches. This poses a high-security risk to the organization, so it’s important that IT admins can proactively deploy security strategies for these specific targets. The dashboard visually displays the problems exposed, ordered from ‘Critical’ to ‘Low,’ making it easy to start tackling the most severe vulnerabilities first.
This a huge boon, particularly for managing device fleets where IT admins can’t physically access devices to examine them. Things are made even easier with the Fleet integrity chart:
Fleet Integrity
If a device has ever installed unofficial software or isn’t running an approved OS version, the Samsung Attestation Server will let you know about it, and the Fleet integrity chart will be updated.
Take action on exposed devices with powerful OS version control
Visibility is priceless, but Knox Suite does more than just point out the problems. With it, you’re able to update a vulnerable device to an OS version with no vulnerabilities, remotely and immediately.
Since end users aren't often familiar with the security policies they need to comply with, forcing these is the best way to dole out updates safely. Knox Suite makes it fast and simple to install critical security patches and OS updates—you can even validate that they’ve been correctly implemented on all deployed devices. It provides reassurance without requiring any action from users.
Don’t want to disrupt an employee halfway through their workday? Simply schedule an update outside working hours, and you can maintain mobile device security without sacrificing productivity.
Armed with this critical combination of fleet intelligence and remote version updates, IT admins can do the vital work they need to do to prevent breaches, even in remote working scenarios where accessing at-risk devices is impossible.
Protect lost or stolen devices
According to InfoSec Institute, 74% of data breaches are caused by human error. Phishing attacks have increased in frequency as remote work has become more widespread. But human error can open security gaps in other ways as well—lost devices, in particular, can pose a significant security headache.
IT has to attempt to recover the lost device, replacement devices have their own cost, and the employees who lose them aren’t doing any more work until you trust them with replacements.
Knox Suite lets you lock down lost devices to protect your business
Knox Suite’s GPS-based location gives you total oversight of device locations and makes it incredibly easy to recover a lost device. If you can’t recover a device, Knox Suite puts security superpowers under your control by securing mobile devices.
Devices by location
When a device is reported missing, you can immediately check the map to see if any devices are in places they shouldn’t be. To help your recovery attempts, IT admins can send messages to the device and trigger ringtones, even on devices in silent mode.
If it’s impossible to locate a missing device, you can still prevent any risk of data leakage. Admins are empowered with a range of functions to enact remotely and instantly, like the ability to lock and even wipe data. Passwords can be reset and untrustworthy apps can be uninstalled entirely remotely.
One of the most useful theft-prevention features that Knox Suite confers is Factory Reset Protection. Even if you’ve managed to lock a device, it may be possible to initiate a factory reset through the bootloader. Factory Reset Protection cuts even this off without the right authentication, making devices secured by Knox a huge frustration for thieves and opportunists.
Knox Suite is an essential safeguard against cybersecurity threats
The threats to your mobile device fleet’s security are so vast and varied, and the cost associated with failing to tackle them is so high, that a robust solution is all but necessary to protect your business’s sensitive data.
An all-in-one enterprise mobility management solution bundle like Knox Suite is the answer. With Knox Suite, you get crucial insight into the state of your fleet, its vulnerabilities, and even where each component is located in real-time, as well as the powers you need to fix the problems it finds.
Why not take it for a spin? Sign up for free and take 90 days to explore all that Knox Suite has to offer today.
