
By Peter Silva | Article Rating: |
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February 5, 2014 10:30 AM EST | Reads: |
6,840 |
You might not know but last week was the 10 year birthday of Cabir, the first mobile malware. It spread through Bluetooth after infecting the Nokia Series 60 phones running Symbian. Also last week, Kindsight Security Labs (Alcatel-Lucent) released the results of a study (pdf) that found more than 11.6 million mobile devices are infected by mobile malware at any given time and that mobile infections increased 20% globally in 2013.
This, obviously, increases risk for stolen personal and financial information, can lead to bill shock resulting from hijacked data usage, or extortion to regain control of the device along with allowing bad guys to remotely track location, download contact lists, intercept/send messages, record conversations and best of all, take pictures.
About 60% of all mobile infections involved Android devices that downloaded malicious software from the Google Play store and 40% were Android phones that received malicious code while tethered to a Windows laptop. Both Blackberry and iPhone combined to represent less than 1% of all infected devices. 4G LTE devices are the most likely to be infected and the number of mobile malware samples grew 20X in 2013. This will only get worse as new strains are released, like the proof of concept code that is capable of tracking your taps and swipes as you use a smartphone. That’s right, monitor touch events. Say a phone has not been touched in a while and suddenly there is 4 touch events. Well, that’s probably a PIN, according to Forbes contributor Tamlin Magee. Add to that a screenshot, now you can overlay the touches with the screenshot and know exactly what is being entered.
You know it and I know it: The more we become one with our mobile devices, the more they become targets. It holds our most precious secrets which can be very valuable to some. We need to use care when operating such a device since, in many ways, our lives depend on it. And it is usually around this point in the article that I chastise mobile users for careless behavior but in this instance, there are certainly times where there is nothing you can do. You can be paranoid, careful and only visit the branded app stores yet the risk is still present.
Ten years in and we’re just getting started.
ps
Related:
- Mobile malware is ten years old today
- Alcatel-Lucent reports 2013 surge in mobile network infections affects 11.6 million devices
- How People Really Use Mobile
- Terrifying new smartphone malware tracks your swipes to steal your PIN
- Trustwave Demonstrates Malware That Logs Touchscreen Swipes To Record Your PIN
- Kindsight Security Labs Malware Report – Q4 2013 (pdf)
- Mobile Threats Rise 261% in Perspective
- The Million Mobile Malware March
- 2014: The year of mobile…or not?
- What is mobile malware? Mobile ad networks muddy the answer
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Published February 5, 2014 Reads 6,840
Copyright © 2014 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Peter Silva
Peter is an F5 evangelist for security, IoT, mobile and core. His background in theatre brings the slightly theatrical and fairly technical together to cover training, writing, speaking, along with overall product evangelism for F5. He's also produced over 350 videos and recorded over 50 audio whitepapers. After working in Professional Theatre for 10 years, Peter decided to change careers. Starting out with a small VAR selling Netopia routers and the Instant Internet box, he soon became one of the first six Internet Specialists for AT&T managing customers on the original ATT WorldNet network.
Now having his Telco background he moved to Verio to focus on access, IP security along with web hosting. After losing a deal to Exodus Communications (now Savvis) for technical reasons, the customer still wanted Peter as their local SE contact so Exodus made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. As only the third person hired in the Midwest, he helped Exodus grow from an executive suite to two enormous datacenters in the Chicago land area working with such customers as Ticketmaster, Rolling Stone, uBid, Orbitz, Best Buy and others.
Writer, speaker and Video Host, he's also been in such plays as The Glass Menagerie, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cinderella and others.
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