By
Telecom Lead Team: As the penetration of mobile devices grows
among enterprise customers, the security of these devices becomes a growing
concern.
The number of malicious programs, targeting mobile
devices, increased 6.4 times in 2011 as compared to 2010, says Kaspersky Lab in
its latest mobile security report.
Kaspersky Lab has identified 5,255 new malware
modifications, and 178 new families throughout the year. The company also
uncovered more new malicious programs targeting mobile devices, than over the
entire 2004 – 2010 period.
During this period, there have been some qualitative
changes in the mobile threats, according to Kaspersky. While unsophisticated SMS Trojans are still the
dominant behavior among all detected mobile threats – their share of all mobile
threats has fallen from 44.2 percent in 2010, to 36.6 percent in 2011, the
report found.
Another notable trend in mobile threat arena is the surge
in Backdoors, which were barely used by cyber criminals in 2010, but now accounts
for the second most prevalent behavior in 2011. The interest in backdoors has
been sparked by virus writers’ growing interest in the Android OS, the most
popular operating system for mobile phones. An overwhelming majority of
detected mobile backdoors target Android smartphones.
There has been steady rise in the number of threats
targeting Android during the last six months of 2011.
Spyware was identified as the third-most common mobile
threat behavior.
Another main event of the mobile threat landscape
in 2011 was the growing malware threat through QR codes. Due to their ease of
use, cyber criminals have started to use malicious QR codes with an encrypted
link leading to the same threats that other traditional URLs lead to
.
51 percent of organizations Lose Data through mobile devices,
says survey
Meanwhile a recent Websense survey said during the past
12 months, 51 percent of the organizations experienced data loss resulting from
employee use of insecure mobile devices, including laptops, smartphones, USB
devices, and tablets, according to a survey conducted by Ponemon Institute in
conjunction with Websense.
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