The latest news is that smartphones are causing a great security threat to the people holding them. The reason as told by experts is that today users trust their phones too much with their personal details. The smartphones have all access to all our accounts, be it transactional or social.
Henry Harrison, cyber expert, Detica said, “This is a fully fledged computer that’s sitting in your pocket”. The biggest problem is that these phones are too smart and too easy to use which makes it easier to hack and people often don’t care about security for their phones.
These cyber crimes are committed by hackers who create fake Wifi hotspots and gain access to passwords and other important details of smartphones in the vicinity of the Wifi zone. Some smartphones ease this process by hooking on to that Wifi zone and starting downloads in their own. Later, these downloads facilitate the hackers in doing their dirt.
This year malware developers are focusing on Android based smartphones the most. Smartphones account for 40% of the total amount of phones sold this year till date. Most of these phones lack the security robustness that can fend of these malwares.
“We have investigated applications for Android devices and basically, based on our statistics, we’ve seen a 2,000 percent increase of malicious applications compared to the last year…Our prediction is that in the following 6 months, we will have a 6,000per cent increase in malicious applications” said Catalin Cosoi from Bitdefender. He added, “Once you have a smartphone, you probably can’t go back to an older version of a phone now that you have access to a computer, social media, emails, pictures and so on. You sort of get addicted, so smartphones are becoming very important,”
Because of their computer like features they store everything that a user needs and hence are a total boon for spies and hackers.
He also said, “On the other hand, it’s very, very easy to create malware for smartphones. Sometimes you can take a malicious part from one application and insert it into another and start propagating an application on the web. So smartphones are increasing and also, it’s very easy to create malicious applications for smartphones.”
This should trigger a security alarm in the minds of the users if they want to stay out of trouble.