Our very own Winn Schwartau writes in the most recent issue of Insecure Magazine.
Smart phones are the new computers. They are highly portable, increasingly powerful with a user base growing at double-digit rates. An estimated 2 billion of them will be deployed globally by 2013. Smart phones are comput-ers that happen to have a telephone in them; they are used for traditional data-oriented computer tasks like email, surfing, data storage and business applications.
Unleashing vast amounts of sophisticated technology to hundreds of millions of people who have already proven that they are either incapable of or unwilling to take the appropri-ate security steps or adapt proper behavior to protect their identity, is a distinct threat to the enterprise and global security.
While to the user smart phones and notably the iPhone family are intuitively easy to use, the risks to the devices, their users or the companies that use them for business are, as with past technology innovations, after-thoughts. Security has – as always – fallen into the abyss of invisibility due to apathy, arrogance or ignorance.We know that smart phone applications are the greatest tool ever devised to deliver hos-tile software to a computing device, and as of 23 June 2010, a study suggests that 20% of Android applications could be spyware.
Check out pages 39 – 42 for the whole story. Get your copy here:
http://www.net-security.org/dl/insecure/INSECURE-Mag-27.pdf
