Your smartphone: a new frontier for hackers
Photo: Reuters
Hackers are out to stymie your smartphone. Last week, security researchers uncovered yet another strain of malicious software aimed at smartphones that run Google's popular Android operating system. The application not only logs details about incoming and outgoing phone calls, it also records those calls. That came a month after researchers discovered a security hole in Apple Inc.'s iPhones, which prompted the German government to warn Apple about the urgency of the threat. Security experts say attacks on smartphones are growing fast and attackers are becoming smarter about developing new techniques. Lookout, a San Francisco-based maker of mobile security software, says it now detects thousands of attempted infections each day on mobile phones running its security software. In January, there were just a few hundred detections a day. The number of detections is nearly doubling every few months. As many as 1 million people were hit by mobile malware in the first half of 2011. Google Inc. has removed about 100 malicious applications from its Android Market app store. One particularly harmful app was downloaded more than 260,000 times before it was removed. Android is the world's most popular smartphone operating software with more than 135 million users worldwide. Symantec Corp., the world's biggest security software maker, is also seeing a jump. Last year, the company identified just five examples of malware unique to Android. So far this year, it's seen 19. When it comes to security, smartphones share a problem with PCs: Infections are typically the responsibility of the user to fix, if the problem is discovered at all. The emergence in early July of a previously unknown security hole in Apple Inc.'s iPhones and iPads cast a spotlight on mobile security. Users downloaded a program that allowed them to run unauthorised programs on their devices. But the program could also be used to help criminals co-opt iPhones. Apple has since issued a fix. Malicious applications often masquerade as legitimate ones, such as games, calculators or pornographic photos and videos. They can appear in advertising links inside other applications. Their moneymaking schemes include new approaches that are impossible on PCs. Google points out that Android security features are designed to limit the interaction between applications and a user's data, and developers can be blocked. Users also are guilty of blithely click through warnings about what personal information an application will access. Malicious programs for the iPhone have been rare. In large part, that's because Apple requires that it examine each application before it goes online. A criminal doesn't even need to tailor his attacks to a mobile phone. Standard email-based "phishing" attacks tricking people into visiting sites that look legitimate work well on mobile users. In fact, mobile users can be more susceptible to phishing attacks than PC users.
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