Android's risky business

On one hand, not deploying smart devices that increase efficiency and productivity could put a business at a competitive disadvantage. But deploying smart devices without a flexible road map that takes Android’s fragmentation into account could mean even worse.

Keeping the enterprise safe

The CRN Test Centre examined three security apps for Android that we liked and that could help secure a device.

Lookout’s eponymous security app is a free and simple download from the Android Market onto a device. A device scan will check for spyware and malware, and the app provides a “Privacy Adviser” that will let a user know what tracking software is on a device.

On one device, Lookout told us we had 10 apps that tracked our location, 10 apps that could read our identity information, one app that could access our text messages and six apps that had access to our contact list.

None were malicious apps, but a couple of them we needed to examine more closely to determine why, exactly, that app needed access to certain sets of data.

We also examined Trend Micro’s Mobile Security. It is $US3.99 ($A3.75); a 30-day trial is free.

Mobile Security, unlike Lookout, provides call and SMS filtering and blocks unwanted calls or messages. A realtime scan zeros in on malware on a device, and Mobile Security appears to scan files just as an antivirus application would scan a Windows PC – although on our Android phone it was a lot quicker and provided much less granular detail on the results.

Finally, we installed AVG Antivirus for Android. Like Lookout and Mobile Security, AVG will scan for malware and vulnerabilities. We liked AVG, too, for the details it provided after every scan. For example, after an initial scan, the app told us we had 176 installed apps, 1375 activity screens, 112 content providers, 243 receivers and 233 services.

The AVG app was free but – and we seldom say this about software we evaluate – it served up advertising in the app itself. That struck us as odd and unlike the enterprise.

What we didn’t see throughout the Android universe, though, were enterprise-ready, centrally managed security solutions like many in IT are used to seeing on platforms such as BlackBerry and Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7. While we don’t see any for Apple’s iOS platform, either, there’s a basic understanding that Apple’s lockdown of the hardware and App Store platforms will go a long way toward securing iPhones and iPads. (That understanding will change, though, the first time there’s a significant data breach on an iOS platform.)