Mobilisafe, a stealthy Seattle mobile security startup bankrolled by Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partners, still isn’t sharing many details about its new product. But the company — led by former T-Mobile software architects Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson — just released some detailed information about the lack of security around mobile devices at small and mid-sized businesses.

Mobilisafe found that 56 percent of iOS devices at small and medium-sized businesses were running out-of-date firmware. It also found that 39 percent of “authenticated devices” were inactive for 30 days or more, meaning that the devices were possibly lost, stolen or misplaced.

“Associated with the high penetration of these devices with the small and mid-sized businesses is a lot of risk, a lot of risk around vulnerabilities, and a lot of risk around devices running out-of-date firmware,” Sreenivas tells GeekWire.

He said the 39 percent figure of “stale devices” raises “significant implications” around the use of mobile devices in a corporate environment.

Among the other findings:

  • The majority of SMB’s are highly mobilized, driven by the bring your own device (BYOD) trend of recent years
  • SMB IT managers significantly underestimate the number and kinds of mobile devices connecting to their network
  • SMB IT departments lack solutions to map their corporate standard for information security used with laptops, desktops and servers to mobile devices. For example, they have tremendous difficulty determining if mobile devices are up-to-date with the latest firmware

Mobilisafe said that it mapped more than 38 million employee mobile device connections that provided the data for the analysis.

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