IT Risk Management: Wireless and Mobile Communication & Equifax Data Breach

IT RISK MANAGEMENT
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Forum 1
Wireless and Mobile Communication
INTRODUCTION
Wireless communication simply means the transfer of the data between two or more things
without connection to any electrical conductors. In early times, the mobile system’s main focus
was on voice only but now transmission of data is also supported by the wireless mobile
communication. Today, the use of wireless mobile communication is increasing rapidly. It has
reduced the equipment cost and improved the capacity and efficiency by adding new more
features. Everyone is using various wireless communication devices such as laptops, PDA
(Personal Digital Assistant) etc. to connect to corporate networks to transfer files, exchanges data
and perform other functions. It supports many applications related to the data and internet and
achieved higher data rates.
Although the data can be transmitted very rapidly, there are many risk and threats associated
with the wireless and mobile communications. But these threats can be solved by the risk
management approaches.
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Risk Associated with the Wireless Mobile Communications:
 Configuration problems
 Rogue-Access points
 Risk related to the shared applications and technology
 Malicious attacks:
 Risk of confidential information
 Radio Congestion
 Security and data breach:
Wireless and mobile communications threats
 Denial of Service: DOS (Denial of Service) attacks means the attacker makes the network
resource unavailable to the user and steal the data.
 Passive Capturing: Passive capturing means capturing the data by listening and targeting the
wireless device and network.
 Network Interruption: In the local network, an access point is installed and any station can
access the internet which gives hackers to intercept the data.
 Data Interception: The data that is transmitted over the wireless mobile device is not always
encrypted. The data can be easily stolen if the transmission is done on the encrypted network.
 Leeching: Intruders can use the bandwidth of your network device while transmitting the
device.
Risk mitigation of Wireless and mobile communications
 To mitigate the Rogue-Access point, use SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
passwords on the access points of the network.
 Instead of sharing the encrypted key, set the authentication technique to open any network.
 If there is no ACL (Access Control List) capability on the access points, then turn off the
DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol), and the user static IP because DHCP automatically
provides IP address of the network which is accessing on the wireless mobile devices.
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