Please put a password on your smartphone.

I recommend people that have smartphones install a password on their phones. Not that it provides a lot of protection, but it does limit the access that a casual phone-picker-upper gets if they take the phone as a target of opportunity. I’d like to think that the average smartphone thief would wipe, or throw away your phone rather than mess with the password, and move on to easier targets.

However thieves that target your phone as a different story, and for them, getting past a four digit lock on your phone might be trivial. There are firms that help police get past codes, and I’m sure there are plenty of instructions and utilities around that a thief with decent computer skills could use. It’s also likely that there are more than a few utilities available to duplicate this functionality.

As more and more of our customers use mobile devices, including tablets, to access systems, we need to be more conscious of security on these devices. Passwords are a start, but remote wipe or disabling are also important. However the thing you might want to invest in most as a data professional is monitoring and analysis of the access to your database. If you can’t completely secure your database, the next best thing is detecting security breaches.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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