The Boogie Man In Your Pocket
You have a smartphone? It's already too late. He has your bank account number, passwords, confidential friends list, and much more. Forget your social security number and your fingerprints, all a professional fraudster needs is your smartphone. It's the equivalent of a burglary in one insidious move. He doesn't even have to steal it.
Every day it seems, you hear about security breaches at major companies like Sony, and personal attacks via viruses attacking your home computer, identity theft, etc. There are many news stories (UK telegraph & Mashable for example) giving examples how vulnerable smart phones are.
No doubt about it, the boogie man is out there, and he is hot on your heels after you. Now there is yet one more way he can get to you, find out your user names, passwords, who you call, who calls you, who your friends are, your calendar agenda, and even track where you go. The vast majority of people are wide open to attack without even realizing it.
Your Smartphone. It has a processor, memory, an operating system, it is a COMPUTER shrunk down into the palm of your hand that happens to have a phone function, but it is primarily a computer.
Your smartphone is every bit as vulnerable as your home computer, in fact even more so, because we do absolutely nothing to protect them. Most people install antivirus software on their computers, but somehow, not our phones, yet we use our smartphones to store highly personal information on, such as banking details, credit card numbers, employee number, etc.
Compounding this, more and more apps are relying on device browsers to run, while browsers on mobile devices aren't as secure as home computers.
Small screen sizes also inherently add to the problem of people out and about on the go hastily clicking on links without really reading and understanding what they are doing.
This is a particularly juicy target for nefarious individuals who want to do you harm. In fact, McAfee, the antivirus company that regularly releases threat reports, states that in the fourth quarter of 2011, the number of mobile malware samples jumped from less than 150 in the third quarter of 2011, to well over 400 in the fourth quarter.
According to McAfee, the first Android exploit came with the first SMS Trojan discovered in the wild in 2010, since then the landscape has become more and more volatile, with sophisticated malicious code seen in the official Android Market during the first half of 2011 like DroidDream, DroidKungFu, and Plankton.
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