"Mobile phones are a huge source of vulnerability," Gordon Snow, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, recently told the Wall Street Journal. "We are definitely seeing an increase in criminal activity." Snow also told WSJ that the FBI's Cyber Division is working on cases based on tips about malicious apps that can compromise banking or be used for espionage. The FBI does not allow its employees to download apps on FBI-issued smartphones.
Usually vulnerabilities are exploited after we download some application on our phone. Experts note that if we cannot help downloading apps for our mobile devices we should at least treat the practice like safe sex. “You can still engage in it, but you need to be wise and to take precautions in order to avoid complications”.
Sex and "sexy malware" played a part in one of the first alerts of mobile botnets aimed at the Symbian. "Sexy Space" was a variant of another mobile malware called "Sexy View". It was capable of downloading new SMS templates from a remote server in order to send out new SMS spam.
"No malware for a mobile device has been known to do that before," said Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor for Trend Micro. Trend Analysts had "heated internal discussions" about whether Sexy Space qualified as botnet code. It took a little bit of social engineering to get users onto a malicious site where it was unknowingly downloaded. Part of its lure was that the vendor seemed to point to "Playboy." Many users were caught without protection and voila! Sexy mobile malware gives a whole new meaning to phone sex.
