The dark side of the smartphone’s surging popularity will be a rise in criminal attacks targeting the devices, warns Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and founder of security provider Kaspersky Lab. Following the latest release of the firm’s Mobile Security suite, CommsDay caught up with Kaspersky to discuss the emerging smartphone threat landscape.
“Usually, mobile phone Trojans focus on SMS messages which are sent to paid numbers, or [fraudulent] bank account transfers,” Kaspersky told CommsDay. “It’s not so visible, compared to computer crime. But now, there are more and more companies, banks and businesses offering smart- phone services like online banking in Australia, Western Europe and North America.”
“Most of the cybercrime is coming from China, Russian speaking coun- tries, and southern American nations, where smartphone services are not so widespread – so the local criminals simply don’t know how to attack smartphones. But the services, sooner or later, will come to these territories as well, and that will be the point where mobile threats for smartphones will become more visible.”
On the bright side, said Kaspersky, smartphone users were beginning to wake up to the potential threats they faced, with around half the company representatives he polled at the recent IDC conference in the UK having a security policy in place for smartphones. “People are beginning to take [mobile security] more and more seriously,” he said.
“They understand that, with smartphones, they have access to confiden- tial data from their corporate environment, everywhere around the globe.” However, he added that this awareness was limited mainly to government and enterprise sectors, with medium and smaller companies still slow to acknowledge the threat.
Kaspersky Lab’s mobile security offering aims to defend across a range of fronts, from traditional anti-virus and anti-spam to theft protection, re- mote locking, wiping and tracking facilities and call blocking. The 8.0 re- lease adds features such as SIMWatch, which alerts users if attempts are made to change the number of a stolen phone, and has been tested for a number of devices in the Nokia, HTC, HP and Toshiba ranges, with the COMMSDAY 24 February 2009 Page 3 firm currently developing versions for Blackberry, iPhone and the Android platform. Petroc Wilton
