14 DAY TRIAL // According to experts, e-crime has been constantly going up for the past couple of years. Mobile phone technology has not been targeted yet, but this is about to change as iPhone and Blackberry devices become more and more popular. Over 30 million smartphones have been sold in the first quarter of 2008 alone and another 275 million are predicted to be sold by the end of the year. The fact that there are so many smartphones out there and all of them have access to the Internet makes things very attractive to e-criminals.
Cloudmark is a company that specializes in messaging security. According to its vice-president of technology services, Neil Cook, hackers and other e-criminals will take an interest in smartphones only after they have achieved a 20%-30% penetration. Sources from Credit Suisse say that if smartphone sales reach 275 million, then a 19% penetration will be achieved.
By 2010 an estimated 1.3 billion computers will be sold all over the world. The number of mobile phones sold by the same time will be of 4 billion. So a spammer or hacker can reach a far greater amount of people if he decides to target smartphones.
India and China have the biggest spam related security problems in the world. Europe and North America are close behind. What seems to be driving these spammers? Neil Cook believes he has the answer: "Spammers are really very good businessmen. They see new opportunities and new markets. As new media becomes attractive to spammers, they move in there. They will move anywhere if they can make a return on investment."
Financial reasons are behind mobile phone spamming in China. The number of PC owners is incredibly small compared to the number of phone owners. It is also cheaper to send SMS spam rather than e-mail spam. Sending out 100,000 e-mail spam messages costs more than sending out the same amount of SMS messages.