Use Threat Intelligence to Boost Mobile Security

Security professionals are recommending that companies integrate threat intelligence, the real-time sharing of intelligence information about cyber security threats and malicious applications, with mobile device management platforms in order to improve mobile security.

The first step, according to Larry Whiteside, Jr., chief security officer of the Lower Colorado River Authority, is to make sure you’re getting the same level of log information from your enterprise mobility management (EMM)/mobile device management (MDM) provider as you would from your desktop security provider.

Bring threat intelligence feeds into your MDM system so you can use the intelligence about dangerous and malicious apps to upgrade your mobile threat defenses. That’s the recommendation of David Jevans, CEO, Chairman, and CTO of Marble Security, a provider of app security services. Often, you can bring in threat intelligence feeds to your MDM/EMM platform using an API from your MDM or threat intelligence platform provider, he says.
 “Threat intelligence can give an enterprise very quick intel into which apps should not be allowed on your network, and this can be done in a matter of hours inside an enterprise,” Jevans says. The idea is to get the data feed, correlate it with MDM and delete those apps immediately or notify those users.

Of course, things are a bit more complicated in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environments, but Jevans still recommends bringing your threat feeds into your MDM. However, he cautioned, that companies need to have management capabilities in place for BYOD in order to know what’s running on users' devices. That typically means deploying an agent to run on user devices that let you know what the device is running, so you can correlate the device to threat intelligence.

It’s important to note that there’s no such thing as mobile specific threat intelligence in the eyes of cyber security experts. Threat intelligence only makes sense when it’s applied across the entire infrastructure. 

Look at threat intelligence as more than just applying individual IP addresses and domains to individual transactions enterprises should look across the entire IT spectrum, including servers, databases and applications to see how mobile interactions are happening and apply threat intelligence to as broad a base as possible.

Threats against mobile devices are part of the larger threat landscape that enterprises face each day. Bringing together MDM/EMM with threat intelligence adds a cyber security over-watch to mobile security ensuring a more expedient response to rising mobile-centric cyber security threats.
Computerworld: http://bit.ly/1GgVUov