Mobitrends

Mobile devices are small computers, that’s now granted. For years now some companies have foreseen that those devices will be target to security threats (F-Secure launched its first Mobile AV for Symbian in 2004 (and was well demoed with the Skull Virus – see pic to the side). Now quite a few players have joined the race with traditional security providers like AVG (through the purchase of DroidSecurity), McAffee (trhough the purchase of tenCube) and new independent players such as Lookout.

The threats have evolved also, we can now see that with the devices being sandboxed, the risk is not so much to get your phone infested with a virus replicating itself in every file than to have a malicious software access your personal data to replicate on your friend’s phones or pass unauthorized calls to premium phone numbers.

Main mobile threats :

• Malicious apps : unauthorized phone calls / text messages, access to private data. Unfortunately most devices and OSes aren’t AV friendly and won’t grant privileges to a software to exit its sandbox to analyze software for threats signatures. Thus AVs are only limited to application reputation to identify potential threats…
• Phishing : on a mobile device it’s even harder to distinct a forged copy of a website from it original self (now link preview, limited graphics…). Same goes with the emails where there is less info than in regular email clients to preview links
• SMS Spam : “someone sent you a voicemail, call and dial #123# to listen to it” : this kind of SMS Spam is tough to monitor and prevent
• Theft : stealing a mobile phone (or just loosing it) can be very easy  : many vendor have anti-theft / lock & wipe features to prevent that. Not to mention the backup that will prevent your files from being lost !

Lookout has recently announced it has passed the 1M user mark, but I’m pretty sure the market is still at its infancy. The OS manufacturers and Phone vendors were targets for very few attacks, but now that a few major Smartphones platforms have emerged such as Android and iOS, this creates a critical mass which makes it worth it for hackers to invest and start looking for breaches. And there’s no doubt they *will* find breaches (proof is hackers keep on jailbreaking every new iOS version as it gets released).

RIM’s consumer-grade protection software for BlackBerry smartphones, dubbed Blackberry Protect, has just been officially announced. Rumored for months, the new service lets customers not attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server:

The application is currently in limited beta trial and no date for General Availability has been communicated

Seems like the mobile security industry is shaking :

• In May, McAfee bought mobile security provider Trust Digital for an undisclosed price
• Last week, Lookout announced it has gotten more than a million registered users in the past six months for its smartphone security app which includes anti-virus, anti-spy/mal-ware, lock and wipe and backup and restore for android, windows mobile and blackberry

Lookout recently secured a second round of funding increasing total funding to a wooping $16.5 million and has only 20 employees – sounds lean enough and ready to last.

While the app stores have been marketed as a safe place by Apple since the very beginning, turns out they can become quite easily the haven of the new-age app piracy. The WSJ runs an article on the subject (thanks @gr for the link) where they give as an example a fake banking application sold 1,50USD on the Google app store.

Of course Apple has a very strict human-based approval process that should limit those malwares/spywares, but while the other app stores only react to notification, bottom line is the mobile app world is getting unsafe, and those articles definitely are raising awareness on this fact.

Even with all the human brain curation of the app store, it appears it’s far from perfect as explains the WSJ article “Consumers should be aware that iPhone security is far from perfect and that a piece of software downloaded from the App Store may still be harmful,” wrote software engineer Nicolas Seriot in a research paper detailing iPhone security holes that he presented at a computer security conference in February.

It’s probably time to secure that environment where apps and andvanced browser lead to the same threats that we’ve been taught to manage on the PC world, just as some visionaries such as F-Secure have foreseen for a couple of years already.