Page 6 - CDM Cyber Warnings November 2013

Mobile Malware Tsunami

Mobile devices are firmly in the targets of hackers with a surge in malware largely aimed
at Android devices surfacing this year. And it’s only going to get worse.

by Alex Balan, Head of Product Management, BullGuard

Back in the day when PCs where large, dull-coloured, clunky objects that took up a mass of

desk space and were typically hooked up to a local network only, people scoffed at the idea of
computer viruses. The concept seemed too radical and almost pointless. We certainly know
different today. From malware designed to secretly extract personal data to clever and

sophisticated viruses that target industrial control systems to take down critical infrastructure the
threat landscape is huge and constantly mutating. And such is the rapid evolvement of malware

that today’s Trojan soon becomes yesterday’s Elk Cloner, the first computer virus.

Given the rapid rise of mobile devices and ubiquitous Internet access, today we’re witnessing an
almost parallel situation in which the threat to mobile computing doesn’t seem to register for

many people beyond the walls of the industry. This is despite an increasingly mounting body of
evidence that points to a surging increase in malware targeting mobile platforms.

Perhaps it’s an overused analogy but the smartphone in your pocket has more computing power
than early space missions. And thanks to Moore’s law, which predicts that every two years
computing power doubles as transistors shrink, we take for granted that these smart pieces of

mobile hardware often tap into reservoirs of high-performance computing (HPC) power that
were previously the sole preserve of governments and the military. Take the Shazam app for

example. Perhaps you’re out and about, hear a tune you like in a shop, but don’t know the
name or the artist. You simply open up Shazam, hold up your whizzy phone to the sounds, and
the name and artist are sent to you within seconds. The app identifies sound wave forms,

sends them to an enormous database and thanks to HPC power matches the wave forms within
seconds or even micro-seconds.

The point of this is that mobile computing has become so commonplace, so every day, so
expected, that our lives, our interactions and our ways of being are effectively captured and

played out on smart, powerful devices. Our family, friends and business associate details are in
there, the videos we’ve made, the hundreds of photos we’ve captured, diaries, banking
information and passwords. Need I go on? How many times have you heard someone say

6 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – November 2013 Edition
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