Infosecurity Europe: Cyber criminals biding time before hitting enterprise tablets

Deloitte claims the ‘bad guys' are awaiting widespread business adoption of tablets before they strike.

Tablets could be becoming the most recent gadget for business users, but Deloitte claims the adoption will not be yet high enough for serious attacks from hackers.

During a presentation at this week's Infosecurity Europe conference, Matt Adams, manager of the safety, privacy and resilience team on the firm, claimed cyber criminals were biding their time before targeting the likes of Apple's iPad until they were full to the brim with valuable data.

“[Tablets] are attracting the interest of the bad guys available and, as stakes increase, they are going to be fully privy to the tech available in the market and the way to take advantage of it,” he said.

“What they're waiting to work out is widespread business adoption before they begin heavily targeting these products.”

This does not imply businesses should chill out on their laurels and never address any security holes of their devices though, with Adams claiming large scale attacks could happen once 2013.

“If you observed of the massive adoption we've seen this year, just think what number of tablets should be in enterprises by 2013 or 2014,” he added.

The major issue with tablets is that they are designed with consumers in mind, instead of large enterprise users.

“A lot of the challenges we see are vendors seeking to retrofit enterprise security environments to compare consumer products workers need to use,” said Adams.

He also claimed companies who started early at developing their very own applications to take advantage of on mobile devices might not have done so with security in mind.

“Early movers in developing in house apps don't really have the expertise in house to develop secure applications,” claimed Adams. “They can code… but they aren't specialists in developing securely on those platforms.”

However, the chief concluded there has been no stopping the rage of bring your personal device and it was as much as businesses to handle the safety concerns before cyber criminals began to attack.

“Mobile device management controls are improving,” he said. “Maybe first generation wasn't that good at plugging into iOS for example… but vendors are really moving on with what's possible, working with Apple and other [manufacturers] to deliver enterprise level security controls for devices that weren't designed primarily for enterprise use.”