Will 2011 Be the Year of Mobile Malware?

[Tharic-Nar]

With the popularity of mobile computing growing at a rapid pace, the threat of malware hitting our phones becomes a bigger risk every single day. Predictions for the past five years have said the same thing, but with this major acceleration, and more robust smartphones, the risk is greater than ever. Is 2011 going to be the year of mobile malware?

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[Kougar]

It's amazing it hasn't become more prolific already, to me. With any smartphone using both apps and featuring built-in social networking, document viewing, and full web browsing, it's only a matter of time now before it starts to take off.

A more challenging question is if it means once spammers go mobile, will most of them then quit throwing parties in our forum!

 

[Rob Williams]

A more challenging question is if it means once spammers go mobile, will most of them then quit throwing parties in our forum!

LOL! I sure hope that'd be true ;-)

I agree though, I expected mobile malware to have been a problem already, but I guess such devices are a bit more difficult to get into. I'm just wondering how long it will take before we start seeing anti-malware programs being sold for mobile phones. It wouldn't surprise me if solutions like that already exist.

 

[Kougar]

They certainly are more difficult, but I still hear about them! There were two or three bits of malware that exploited random program vulnerabilities to hijack certain phones last year, iPhone, Android, so on..

Lets see... something about a fake anti-virus program that itself was a virus, which supposedly infected over a million phones in China. Android had a malicious application that siphoned off money from users that installed it by sending texts to a donation number. And I thought I read awhile back about some malicious program that spread through part of a stadium during some game event. It spread from phone to nearby phones via open bluetooth infecting a small number of phones and targeting contact list information. I can't seem to google that one up though, maybe it was a proof of concept thing...