Today some employees prefer to mix their personal life with their work and another set of workers are forced to work from home as the work load becomes higher. Working from home has become popular among us and a new concept has emerged, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). BYOD is the use of IT devices in office that belong to the employee himself rather than the employer. The employee uses his own devices such as Smartphones, tablets or laptops in his office and at home for work without the need to adhere specific hardware requirements mandated by the employer.

The good

BYOD clearly has distinctive advantages. Firstly the IT department sees BYOD as a cost cutting measure since the department doesn’t need to spend huge amount of money to buy IT equipment for their employees. With BYOD employees may use their own equipment such as laptops and Smartphones in the office.

Out of the blue you receive an email informing you about a large sum of money that is trapped in a foreign bank account a wealthy politician has died leaving a large sum of money. The sender is asking your help to transfer the money out of the country. You will receive a huge reward as well. The sender asks you to give them your bank account details to transfer the money then asks you to pay transfer fee/tax to transfer money out of the country. This fee may start with a small amount but will increase. The criminal will make up new fees that is necessary to be paid to receive your reward. It does not matter how much you pay, you will never receive your reward. This is a “scam” a type of social engineering and this particular scam is commonly known as “419 scam” an advanced fee fraud.

Criminals can use sophisticated attacks to gain access to your computer or trick you and obtain money. But they have another easier and non sophisticated tool in their arsenal called “social engineering”. Social engineering uses human interaction(social skills) and obtains confidential information. The obtained information is then used in accessing the user accounts or according to the above example the user is tricked in obtaining money.