Your Phone Could be the Next Target
It's ironic I stumbled upon this information this morning because when I first got my new smartphone it did dawn on me my phone could be the target of a cyber attack. And then just last week, Jeff Levack asked our digital specialist if phones could one day be susceptible to viruses or hackers.
I don't know about you, but I have a lot of information linked to my phone: multiple email addresses, my Facebook account, contacts, and of course, all my searches on the Internet. So why wouldn't my phone be just as prone to a virus or hacker as my home computer?
Cyber criminals are in fact moving away from e-mail and toward hacking mobile devices and platforms. A recent report by McAfee says new mobile malware threats jumped 46-percent in the fourth quarter of 2010 compared to a year ago. Some of MacAfee's other findings conclude Adobe Acrobat is a favored software to exploit and that the fourth quarter of 2010 saw the lowest spam volumes since 2007.
Scary, isn't it? Though malware is still not a huge threat (or so the wireless phone carriers claim) it's inevitable. Afterall, some day we will all be carrying around these bite-sized computers so why wouldn't a motive driven hacker want to get into our phones? Many technology gurus wonder, "will 2011 be the year of mobile malware?"
Check out this link for more information on malware: Malware.