Just three short days ago, this blog made the not-so-difficult prediction that the Australian born iPhone worm “iKee” would undoubtedly lead to much more nefarious payloads born from malicious intents.  Yesterday, we began hearing reports of a new cross platform iPhone malware, dubbed iPhone/Privacy.A which is being used to mine iPhones for coveted personal/confidential information. continue reading…

In the past few months, there has been a tremendous increase in the release of spyware applications for smartphone devices. Earlier this year we saw the release of the first spyware application for the iPhone that supported 2G/3G/3GS iPhones. Later we saw the releases of more advanced spyware applications for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. And recently, on Nov 06, 2009, the world’s first spyware application for Android was released.  In summary, this year alone we have seen that the threats that were dominating Windows and Symbian devices have begun to make their way to the sexier BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices.

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November must be the month of firsts in mobile security.  In the first days of November, reports were coming out about a Dutch hacker that was attacking iPhones via SSH, using the well known root password for jailbroken devices.  As our regular readers might recall, SMobile released a report detailing the process to bypass iPhone’s security implementations by jailbreaking the device.  They’ll also recall that our testing team was able to gain root access to the test iPhones by connecting to the device over SSH and using the root account credentials that had been revealed during the research that led to the discovery of the jailbreak process. The Dutch attacker was simply using the same information to take control of victim devices that he was able to locate and connect to, then blackmailing them into paying to release the data on their devices.

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SMobile Systems is proud to announce that it is the first mobile security company to detect and prevent its customers from the World’s first Spyware threat for Android devices. On Oct 26, 2009, the MobileSpy officially released the spyware version for BlackBerry. Now, they have released the world’s first mobile spyware application for Android. It appears that the Mobile Spy team has been working hard in the last couple of weeks to get their spyware application ported to Android devices. According to Mobile Spy, “this Spyware Application is not meant for a use on a phone you do not own and have proper permissions to monitor”, and its spyware now supports all Android models, including the new Motorola Droid and T-Mobile My Touch 3G.

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According to a survey conducted by a mobile advertising researcher, AdMob, smartphone users are driving up the use of Wi-Fi hotspots. The result of the survey indicates that there were 550 million smartphone Wi-Fi requests in Western Europe alone in 2008, a 132% increase for the year. AdMob said that 42% of the requests fromMIMT Whitepaper iPhones originated from Wi-Fi hotspots [1]. In the United States, AT&T reported a 41% increase for the year in iPhone connections, alone, at wireless hotspots [2]. In a new report, the market research firm Yankee group [3] has forecast that the number of smartphone users will quadruple to 160 million by the year 2013. In another report released by ABI Research, Wi-Fi smartphone sales will double by 2011 [4]. ABI Research also found that 74% of people who have Wi-Fi enabled smartphone’s use the technology and 77% say they want a Wi-Fi enabled handset when they make their next purchase [5].

MITM Attack Whitepaper