Plugged In by Silman Jon;

Author:Silman, Jon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2016-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

16

THE SPECIFIC CHALLENGES OF MOBILE SECURITY

Before the advent of the iPhone or the smartphone, cell phones were much simpler—easy and convenient ways to contact people. Now, they do the same things computers do, stream movies and video, take pictures, send and receive email, and, of course, browse the web. But while security and virus protection are standard procedures and top-of-mind concerns when users are operating a computer, a phone is not as intuitive. This oversight might just be because smartphones of the present day are constantly changing, evolving, and adding new features. They’re also less customizable, at least for the average user. Perhaps because of the smaller size or touchscreen input capabilities, phones are designed to work without a need for the user to make many decisions, except to agree or disagree to a set of permissions.

A computer with a keyboard, on the other hand, is easier to get information out of and easier to handle, settings wise. This could be partly by design, as Apple products are notoriously easy to use but hard to customize, whereas Android-type phones are meant to be customizable, but potentially difficult to do so for the common customer.

Another issue is the way programs are added to a phone. You have to download applications, or apps, from a specific place, and hope for the best. You don’t really know how secure an application is going to be, and there are many stories of counterfeit apps from China that are specifically designed to steal data—basically, mobile malware.

Smartphones and their users are a growing demographic. If anything, smartphones could potentially outnumber physical computers, as their capabilities and computing power rise exponentially, the same way they did with desktops and laptops.

The point here is that security for mobile phones is not as intuitive as it is with regular computers. Most people don’t choose to—or even realize they can—download any type of virus protection on their phones. They aren’t aware of the true dangers, or how vulnerable they could be simply by logging on to an open wifi network, as Kevin Butler explained previously.

Every year, the threat of mobile malware increases. It was once thought to be only a marginal threat. In 2013, The Economist ran a story about the numbers. It claimed that mobile malware was still very much in its infancy. They cited Adrian Ludwig, then Google’s top security engineer, who posited that only one in one hundred thousand apps downloaded by Android users, whether they were legitimate or otherwise, posed any threat. The story also cited researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a security firm based in Atlanta, called Damballa.

After studying two different networks with 380 million users between them, the researchers found fewer than 3,500 phones with signs of infections from malware. That’s about one in 108,000. That would mean about 15,000 out of the estimated 1.5 billion (at the time) mobile devices out there were infected. That was 2013.

The numbers, as in the case of any study, are not the easiest to rely on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.