14 DAY TRIAL // Security vendor McAfee has released the Mobile Security Report 2009, according to which the number of security issues that affect mobile devices has significantly increased during the past year. Nearly half of all global manufacturers agree that the issues have seriously impacted their business, the report notes.
Security experts have speculated that, while mobile devices of all sorts will become more popular, so will security issues affecting them. This should come as no surprise, as today's malware developers are strongly driven by monetary gains and mobile users are a constantly growing potential market.
The sophistication of mobile security incidents was spiked during the past year for all types of threats, variating from exploits to voice and text spam. Nearly a fifth of all manufacturers reported incidents that affected over 1 million devices.
However, the upswing in malicious activity on the mobile platforms also had a beneficial result that took the form of an increase in security awareness from the mobile manufacturers. According to the McAfee report (PDF), 70% of manufacturers consider addressing security issues as being critical, and almost the same percentage reckons integrated mobile security as being the best solution.
Even if half of the 30 international mobile manufacturers that participated in the research noted that mitigating security problems had proven costly to their business, they still considered that these expenditures should be supported by the mobile carriers or by them and not by the user.
"Attempts to make the mobile ecosystem more open have shown early signs of success, yet attacks on mobile networks and devices continue to grow in both complexity and sophistication. This elevates concerns surrounding the security for both existing and emerging services. Hence it is encouraging to see that mobile manufacturers are looking to regain control of providing security functionality to safeguard their users," Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president of McAfee Mobile Security, commented.
In 2009, we have reported the case of a mobile trojan that is able to steal credit by sending unauthorized SMS messages to a credit-transferring service number. The first variant was programmed in Python and was thus limited to the Symbian platforms that had a Python interpreter installed. However, the malware authors quickly adapted and expanded their range by releasing a version for the J2ME platform found in most of the modern mobile phones.