UK financial advisers, Grant Thornton, says that organizations that fail to lock-down bluetooth connections on company-owned laptops and other portable devices are taking a huge data theft gamble. The company says the number of bluesnarfing attacks - where a connection between two devices is forced without the consent of the target machine - is on the increase.
Grant Thornton gives the unsurprising advice that non-essential bluetooth links should be turned off. But can employees be trusted to do this themselves, or is it better to manage this centrally?
Solutions like Centennial DeviceWall can help extend endpoint security by locking-down bluetooth connections in addition to managing the flow of data through wired communications such as USB and firwire ports. With every new laptop now seemingly enabled for bluetooth out-of-the-box, could 2007 be the year of the ‘bluesnarfer’?
