Posts filed under ‘mobile security’
is your mobile in hot water
Or for that matter cold water – the WSJ reports on the trend of mobile phones getting damaged by accidental exposure to water, and some interesting remedial courses of action taken by users.
So what’s in the reckoning, 30m water resistant phones – certainly, hope floats.
When Debora Munczek’s BlackBerry slipped off her folded newspaper and into the toilet one morning, she suspected it wasn’t the first time in history that a cellphone got drenched. So she searched “cellphones and water” on the Internet and followed the advice that popped up: Remove the battery, wrap the device in a dry washcloth and aluminum foil, and bake it in the oven for several hours at a low setting.
The phone worked pretty well after that — until Ms. Munczek, a sleep-deprived clinical psychologist in New York City, dropped it twice more into the toilet. It then began dialing random phonebook entries, including the local police precinct. That was when she decided to call it quits and get a new phone.
beep, you’ve got spam
Brace yourself, it’s no longer your personal space – the spammers have set their sights on your phone. The NYT reports that the number of unsolicited messages received by mobile phone users has doubled in the last two years. The carriers have a seething task on hand as users generally attribute spam to the carrier even though it’s highly possible that users might have unintentionally revealed their personal information on social networking sites and other such public fora.
One day in March, Anthony Melone, Verizon Wireless’s chief technology officer, began getting complaints from customers in the Northeast and Midwest about a wave of unsolicited text messages that were flooding its network. Mr. Melone said Verizon technicians tracked down the source and found the messages were coming from someone using e-mail accounts at Microsoft’s Internet portal, msn.com.
It took a day to quell the assault because the spammers kept changing their e-mail addresses and the Web sites they were promoting. By then, nearly five million messages had made it past the network’s anti-spam filters, resulting in grumbling and demands for refunds from customers.
viruses shift to a new battlefront – your mobile
It’s the calm before the storm – increasingly mobile devices and networks are coming under virus and spam attacks. BBC reports that most attack patterns currently indicate targeting of focused segments and users. It remains to be seen if we will wake up to these attacks before a major outbreak.
One instructive instance of a malicious program is known as Viver, it hides its malicious code inside three fake applications. Installing any one of those bogus applications on a Symbian phone starts that handset sending costly premium rate SMS messages to an international number. Each SMS message costs about $7.
In one outbreak logged by F-Secure, one of the few firms that produces anti-virus software for phones, an operator with 14m subscribers had 8,000 devices infected with a virus that resulted in the sending of more than 450,000 multimedia messages (MMS). One handset alone sent 3,500 of those messages.
Spam on mobiles is also starting to become a bigger problem. One of the biggest spam bombardments on mobiles took place in March 2007 in China when about half the nation’s mobile phone owners received several unsolicited commercial messages in one day.
