Roel Schouwenberg, a senior malware researcher at Kaspersky Lab Americas, is presenting a startling prediction for 2010. As highlighted today on 24/7 Wallstreet, Google Wave, the iPhone and Android could sustain heavy cyber attacks next year.
Schouwenberg predicts that hackers will make major assaults on the Apple iPhone and handsets running the Google Android operating system beginning in 2010. “The first malicious programs for these mobile platforms appeared in 2009, a sure sign that they have aroused the interest of cybercriminals.”
Software security has become a multi-billion industry, particularly protecting Microsoft products. McAfee (NYSE:MFE) and Symantec (NASDAQ:SYMC), the two largest software security companies, had $8 billion in revenue between them last year. But, the PC and server worlds are still awash in spam, phishing attacks, and malware problems. The best that can be said about the two software security firms and their competitors is that the problems are not worse than they are already.
Even though Schouwenberg may be a little too "gloom and doom" for most, it stands to reason that as smartphones and mobile technologies become more sophisticated, so too will the hackers and their devious plots to exploit vulnerabilities - of which there are obviously more today than ever.
That still leaves one of the primary purposes for malicious hacking which is simply to cause chaos. A software expert decides to disrupt a large technology ecosystem because he can. As Alfred said in the Batman movie “The Dark Knight”, “… some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” The iPhone OSX and Android operating systems are vulnerable because they are popular and there may not be any comprehensive defense against that.
Reply
