Wireless / Mobile Security — News

Google's US$12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility is being reported primarily in terms of access to patents and difficulty integrating the corporate cultures. But there's also a potential longer-term spin-off. Secure Android smartphones.

Worried by the spate of news stories about malware targeting Android phones and tablets? There's a way to get some peace of mind: Symantec's just-released Norton Mobile Security, which promises the same type of security for Android devices that its big brother counterpart offers for PCs. (The app was previously available as a beta.)

Android doesn't rival BlackBerry when it comes to security and enterprise support. But Android devices can still be reasonably secure. Here are some tips to help you protect your investment, privacy, and data.

A lot of the software written for Google's Android mobile phones falls short when it comes to user privacy and security.

The QNX operating system that will power future BlackBerry devices has been given a cagey thumbs up by penetration testers commissioned to probe for weaknesses in its design.

The rise of smartphones and tablets brings unprecedented mobility, but with the convenience of being able to carry and access information from virtually anywhere comes an increased threat that attackers can also steal or access your information from virtually anywhere. AT&T announced today that it is taking proactive steps to strengthen mobile security by investing in a new mobile security platform.

A study from digital security company viaForensics paints a stark picture of the vulnerability of smartphone user data. viaForensics evaluated 100 popular consumer apps running on Android and iOS, and found that 76 percent store usernames, while 10 percent store passwords as plain text. Those 10 percent included popular sites such as LinkedIn, Skype, and Hushmail.

Hackers defaced the official Blackberry Blog today in retaliation for Research In Motion's pledge to assist police "in any way we can" in their efforts to quell the riots in London in recent days.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found a school in Hampshire in breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA) after the personal details of nearly 20,000 people were put at risk when the school's website was hacked.

Cisco has admitted to sending customers warranty CDs that, when opened in a browser, took users to a website know to have hosted malware.

Wikileaks, hacking incidents like those attributed to LulzSec, and even the UK's News of the World voicemail scandal represent a fourth stage in the evolution of cybercrime, according to Dr Paul Nielsen, director and chief executive officer of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburg.

Stories about lost wages aren't the only scary things being talked about in Sin City this week. The best security researchers and hackers from around the world have gathered in Las Vegas, and news about their work has been creeping out like a toxic flood.

If you'd never heard the phrase 'advanced persistent threat' before, you may have gotten an ear full of it the past week in a collection of news stories that used the APT term to describe a variety of network security problems that are causing big problems.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday introduced its first mobile app: an iPhone application aimed at helping parents whose children go missing.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts to make its User Access Control (UAC) security prompts less annoying, many users are still turning it off and in doing so helping thieves do their job, according to Microsoft.

The best way to protect business information on smartphones from cybercriminals is to leave that information off smartphones, according to a mobile security expert.

Standards body the IEEE has called for proposals to build a catalogue of people using binary “packers”, the software tools often used by malware writers to hide executable files from antivirus products.

Every major corporation harbouring valuable information has been compromised, but only some know it, according to executives at McAfee and RSA.

While 69 percent of organizations have employees using personal devices to connect to their corporate network, more than one-fifth, or 21 percent, currently have no policy in place to govern the use of personal mobile devices on their network. These new figures, released recently from security-products firm Courion, suggest many security leaders are still ignoring the need to address mobile-device management among their employees.

Using data collected from its Mobile Threat Network, Lookout today released a full report on the state of mobile malware and security. The report covers both Android and iOS, and compares the risks that both platforms face. You can view and download the full report on Lookout's blog, but here are a few of the highlights: