Spammers poised to target BlackBerry and iPhone owners
A couple of general comments/rants before the article that appeared on TimesOnLine. One, in general, at least in the corporate world, email on a Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, or other Smartphone typically mirrors the backend servers of your organization. Whatever filters, spam blocking, etc., you have on the backend will prevent making it to the handheld. So, if you have antivirus or spam blockers on the backend, how in the world will those make it to the handheld? The only risk there will be email that is set up from personal email accounts. By default, attachments are not downloaded, meaning the owner of the handheld has one additional step to get “viruses” on to their handheld. Second, there’s a comment in this article about the cost of “text” versus the cost of “email”. Is it me or does this fall in to the “duh” factor. If I sit at my computer and crank out messages to cell phones (i.e. all wireless carriers have email addresses such as xxxxxxxxxx@txt.att.net), who pays for those messages? Me, or the person receiving the message? Why would the cost be higher to send text, unless of course I’m dumb enough to actually use my own cell phone to send the messages. Do I receive a bill for sending the messages? If not, why in the world is it more expensive to send text messages than it is to send email? Read the info below and decide for yourself. I also notice its companies who sell products to “protect you” that always get quoted about how bad it’s going to get.
The rising popularity of smartphones such as the BlackBerry and the iPhone will make them targets for viruses and spam, security experts believe.
In the past few years the internet has experienced a huge rise in security problems, led by criminal gangs who have used spam and viruses for financial scams. Mobile phones have remained relatively unscathed, but that is set to change as sales of smartphones surge.
In the first three months of this year 32.2 million smartphones were sold - 11 per cent of all handset sales and a 29 per cent increase on the same period last year.
These e-mail and internet-enabled handsets are moving out of the corporate market into consumers' hands, and the recent launch of the 3G iPhone is expected to fuel sales further. Credit Suisse analysts predict that 275 million smartphones will be sold next year, boosting penetration to 19 per cent and making the mobile world attractive to criminals.
Neil Cook, vice-president of technology services for Cloudmark, a messaging security company, estimates that penetration of smartphones needs to reach 20 per cent to 30 per cent before it becomes worthwhile for hackers to spread viruses. Spam is a problem in India and China, and North America and Europe are expected to follow.
Mr Cook said that the rise in spamming and scams boils down to economics. “Spammers are really very good businessmen,” he said. “They see new opportunities and new markets. As new media becomes attractive to spammers, they move in there. They will move anywhere if they can make a return on investment.”
Another attraction for spammers is that mobiles are quickly outgrowing the number of computers. Gartner, the industry analyst, forecasts that there will be four billion mobiles compared with 1.3 billion computers by 2010. Mobile spam is rampant in China, where it is much cheaper to send texts and fewer people have computers, Mr Cook said. Others are more sceptical. Sending 100,000 spam e-mails costs only a few dollars, which is significantly cheaper than texting, Carole Theriault, senior security consultant for Sophos, a computer security company, said.