Password-Free Phones Pose ID Theft Threat

Take your company's most sensitive documents, shove them in a plastic grocery bag and walk outside in a rainstorm. This will make you as effective at corporate secrecy as one-third of IT workers, when it comes to safeguarding their phones.

According to a survey of 227 IT professionals, a majority of whom are employed by large companies, a devil-may-care 35% don't use passwords on their business phones. This wouldn't merit a mention if the survey, conducted by London-based security firm Credant Technologies, hadn't also found that 80% of its respondents kept clients' contact information on their phones.

Coupled with the 23% who keep work e-mail and 12% who keep calendars on their smart phones, IT workers have become walking file closets - and companies want the keys back.

"The idea of taking a notebook computer on the road without protecting the device or certain files is a regrettable concept, but workers just don't feel that the information that's available on their phone is that sensitive," says Charles King, principal analyst for Hayward, Calif.-based research firm Pund-IT. "They haven't quite gotten it through their heads that the phones are gateways to very valuable information that should be secured."

In the case of former Telstra(TLSYY Quote) Chief Executive Sol Trujillo, who lost his HTC Touch at the GSMA Mobile World Conference in February, his company resolved the situation by deleting the contents of his phone remotely using a security program.

While Microsoft's(MSFT Quote) Windows Mobile (which Trujillo's phone used), Apple's(AAPL Quote) iPhone 3.0, Symbian, Research In Motion's(RIMM Quote) BlackBerry and Google's(GOOG Quote) Android operating systems can lock and delete files remotely, the maker of once such application say it's no excuse for password passivity.