Mobile banking sure to attract criminals
Posted on | December 26, 2008 | add a comment
More Europeans than ever are using their mobile phones to do wireless banking. A comScore M:Metrics survey commissioned by Airwide Solutions found that 5.6 million people in the EU access financial information from their mobile phones – a 23.6 % year- over-year increase.
Seaton
It is starting to look like the emerging market for cellphone security products could, indeed, be a robust part of the tech market in 2009, as I predicted in this June 2008 news story. Cyber gangs have saturated the Internet with data-stealing, Trojan-spreading botnets. So it’s simple logic that the elite gangs will follow people as they e-mail, text message and begin doing financial transactions from their mobile devices.
As the general populous goes more mobile, so will cyber criminals. The pattern is all too familiar. Jay Seaton, Airwide’s chief marketing officer points to a steady rise in global SMS spam that is beginning to morph into “snoopware that enables the hacker to listen in on conversations, install spyware that allows him to access phone logs and contacts, and send text messages and multimedia spam to other devices.”
It doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that cyber criminals will gravitate to mobile devices as an attack vector to do more corporate intrusions — which are scaling up, as I revealed in this November investigative cover story.
“The most frightening aspect about mobile malware is its potential to use an infected smartphone or other device as a proxy or gateway into an organization’s core network,” says Seaton. “Hijacking a handheld device, hackers can breeze past a traditional firewall and make their way onto a company’s mail server, customer database, CRM tools, and other critical parts of the network. And this damage may result from something simple, such as an employee receiving a message to download a free game or antivirus update.”
