Though instances of viruses and hacking on mobile phones are rare, there is evidence and good reason to expect these attacks to rise in the future as users become more dependent on mobile phones for access to the Web, social interaction, and entertainment.
A recent poll of 2,000 people in the U.S., Britain, and Japan was conducted by McAfee. The results found that 2.1% of respondents had experienced a virus on their mobile phones themselves, while 11.6% knew someone who experienced one. A rather large 86.3% indicated that they had no experiences with viruses on mobile phones.
As expected, virus attacks were far more common in Japan, where the mobile phone market is further developed and technologically advanced than elsewhere. The more frequent use of mobile phones to access the Internet and to download content in this market and others where mobile phone technology is more advanced opens the door for more vulnerability to viruses and hacking attacks.
With other markets making advances in their mobile phone technologies, the risk of experiencing a virus attack grows for the average mobile phone user. This, of course, opens up an opportunity for IT security companies such as McAfee to establish themselves and increase their revenues.
This threat grows when viewed in light of the more frequent use of mobile phones to conduct online banking transactions. A Juniper Research report titled “Mobile Financial Services: Banking & payment markets 2007-2011” revealed that the firm expects 612 million mobile phone users around the world to generate $587 billion worth of financial transactions. About $22 billion worth of transactions will be derived from mobile payments through the actions of 204 million mobile phone users.
Mobile phone users who access their bank accounts through their devices and carry out transactions will make for highly desirable targets for those looking to take advantage of a still-susceptible market.
Still, mobile phone viruses have been relatively harmless so far. Most of them are “written by kids to show off,” according to Emmanuel Forgues, who is from Kaspersky, the Russian IT security firm. They are oftentimes propagated through MMS and text messages that contain an attached video, audio, or picture file.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080216/tc_afp/
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http://www.emarketer.com/
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