Page 11 - index

Mobile Banking inSecurity

By Pierluigi Paganini, Editor-in-Chief, Cyber Defense Magazine

The market demand for mobile banking application and increasing as never before means that
financial institutions have been managing the security risk related to the rapid diffusion of the
mobile platforms.

Mobile platforms represent a privileged channel for banking and financial institutions to offer
their services due to the high penetration level of technology. The rapid evolution of mobile
banking is attracting cyber criminals and other threat actors that compromising such mobile
banking services can reach a wide audience that is in the majority of the case unaware of the
cyber threats.

ABI Research estimates that users for their smartphones and tables downloaded over 70 billion
mobile apps worldwide in 2013.

But surface of attack for mobile users is still wide, mobile devices present greater security risk
respect laptop or desktop, the lack of user authentication, defensive measures and awareness
on cyber threats expose users to serious risks.

Analyzing data related to the evolution of malware for principal mobile operating systems it is
possible to note the rapid diffusion of new threat families. According to the data published by F-
Secure in the last MOBILE THREAT REPORT 2014, in the e first quarter the experts detected
275 new malware families (or new variants of known families) that run on Android and 1 new
threat family each on iPhone and Symbian.

Malware authors are focusing their effort for the development of new malicious codes to adopt
for banking fraud, these malware is able to silently monitor and divert banking-related activities,

12 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – CTIA Special Edition, September 2014
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide