Mobile device security

- Is there anything more terrifying than to suddenly come home and discover that you don't have your smartphone. That you left in a cab or you dropped it on the street, or you got held up and somebody took it from you. The bottom line is is that if somebody gets the information on this device, you're in a lot of trouble. Our banking is on here, personal information, all of our contacts, and friends, and phone numbers, who knows what's on there and the last thing we want is anybody to get to this information unauthorized. So, hopefully I'm really preaching to the choir on a lot of this stuff, but let's go over what we need to do to keep our smart devices secure. So the first one and the big one is going to be a screen lock. It blows my mind away how many people still don't use a screen lock. All I, they have to do is they go up to their phone, they press a button, turn it on, and you're in. And all I got to do is go to your bank account or go over to eBay and buy stuff. Not a good idea. So screen locks are really, really important. Now, screen lock functionalities are very similar between Android and iPhones, but I'm going to do this one on an Android. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into Settings, and I'm going into Security Location on this version. And right now you'll see the screen lock says none. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to look up my options. So I can do a swipe, which is really no screen lock at all, but it does require you to at least swipe it. I can make a pattern, I can type in a PIN code, or I can type in a password. So let's go ahead and try pattern. So I'm going to have to give it some pattern. And once, what am I going to show on the screen? Okay, so you've got a lot of options when it comes to setting up a screen lock. Keep in mind that you can also do things, for example, face recognition. Now we can't really do that in Android without third-party apps, but it is now built into IOS devices. Here's an example of one. Now, if you want to take it another step further, you can do multifactor authentication, which simply means doing more than one of these. Now, it's not very common on a screen lock to see multifactor authentication. It can happen, but we usually do it with individual applications, like, for example, I might have a particular program where not only do I have to log in with a passcode, but then it's going to then call my cellphone and text me back a number, and then I have to punch that in. So it's requiring two authentication factors, and anytime you're worried about security, multifactor authentication is the way to go. All of my banking tools, all of my health tools, all use multifactor authentication, no exception to that. Now, while you're logging in, sometimes you might forget things like passcodes or patterns or things like that. So you will have a number of failed login attempt restrictions. So basically, like, let's use iPhones as an example. After you try logging in a certain number of times, it kind of puts you in time out and makes you wait a little bit longer until you can try again. There is a setting on iPhones for example, that will set the number of times you can attempt before it erases the phone. So, here's an example of that setting on an iPhone. The other handy tool are authenticator apps. A lot of times, especially if I'm using a tool, like for example, Google, or if I'm using Microsoft products, I'm constantly logging in to all these different apps. So what I'd like to have is some kind of authenticator app which adds an extra layer of protection. So, on this phone I actually have one. This is the Microsoft authenticator app. And what you're looking at here is a code that I have to type in. So if I'm logging in to a Microsoft product where I've activated it to use this, not only will I have to log in through a passcode or username and password, whatever it might be, but then it's going to tell me to punch in this code as well. So, the only downside to authenticator apps is that once you set up an application to use them, if you lose your phone, you could often be in trouble. So, for example, Google has an authenticator, but it comes with backup codes. So that if you ever run into trouble, you actually have these codes, so when you get your new phone, you can use one of these codes and get around that type of stuff. So be careful with authenticator apps. The other thing we run into with these phones is that we lose them, and we're nervous when we lose them, and understandably so. So, one of the things we'd like to be able to do is, number one, find our phone. So both IOS and Android have wonderful tools. It's called Find My iPhone in the IOS world, and in Android, it's called the Android Device Locator. So I've got Android Device Locator running right now. So all I had to do was go to Android Device Locator, type it in, and this popped up. Now if you take a look, it actually shows my phone. Yep, that's where I am right now. Fuqua Street, Houston, Texas, yee haw, all right? So I've got a couple of options here that are handy. For example, play sound. So if I hit this. - [Man's Voice] It's for you, Mike. It's for you, Mike. - [Mike] Idn't that a great sound? Okay. - It's for you, Mike. - Stop! There we go. So, that's one thing. That can be often handy when you drop your phone behind the bed, you can't find it. The other one is that you can lock the device out. And just lock it out so that nobody can get to it. None of your login stuff will work and you're going to have to actually go back and open the device through a different computer on a Google account. And the last one that's kind of handy is erase device. So on this one, I can just click on this, and it will completely erase everything on this phone. And again, pretty much iPhones have the exact same options, and it is a wonderful and handy tool. The other type of security I want to talk about is something that's a little bit more aggressive. And this is called, basically, it's under the umbrella of what we call mobile device management. When you're in a corporate environment, you really have some amazing tools when it comes to what you can do on a phone. For example, if I have what we call "Bring Your Own Device", B-Y-O-D, it's kind of limited in terms of what you can do. Because I own the phone, and if the company wants to put their stuff on it, that can often be a question mark. So what you'll see instead is you'll see corporate-owned devices. So what'll happen is, now I've got my Total Seminars phone. Now, if you have that, you have enterprise level controls that you can do all kinds of amazing things. You can set up security policies, you can do all kinds of really lockdown type of stuff, big passwords, anything you want. In fact, one of the big ones, and I want to make mention of this because it happens a lot, is somebody hands you a phone from the corportation. You're like hey, I got a phone here, so you know, I'm going to play some fun game with Pokemons or something, so you want to install Pokemon Go, and you go into the store and you know what? That's not an option. That's because in corporate-owned devices, they can actually whitelist only certain applications that can show up in the store. It's a very very powerful tool. If you want to learn more about that, take my Security Plus course. We go into amazing deal on MDM. (light music)