PEOPLE who bring palmtop computers into the office could be unwittingly giving hackers easy access to their company’s computer networks.
Hand-held “personal digital assistants” (PDAs) are commonplace in offices. But if you plug one in to a company network to download your calendar or retrieve email, the device could easily gather information from the network and send it to a hacker’s PC.
The loophole exists because most network security systems use software “firewalls” as their main defence against external hacking, while internal network security is often far more lax. The problem was demonstrated at the hackers’ annual Black Hat conference…
