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Prediction: 2014 – The Big Bang Year of Mobile Malware
Yes, 2014 is litterly around the corner and the tail end of 2013 has been
abuzz with they typical Brick and Mortar and eCommerce retailer hacking
and thefts such as the recent breach at Target in the US. You can keep
up with these breaches at http://www.privacyrights.org.
However, quietly lurking as a strong under current, and many of you have
seen my recent articles and blog posts on this subject is the nearly
explosive growth of Mobile Malware.
I fear that 2014 will be the year of Mobile Malware exploding onto the
scene in full force. Recently, when the FTC.gov discovered that an Android Flashlight app was behaving
maliciously (such as eavesdropping on user location, contact list and much more), the US Government
stepped in and fined the company, threatening to shut them down if they don’t fix the behavior and
provide better disclosure information to their 50,000,000 (yes, 50m) end-user community.
This is just the beginning. Just checkout Dat Dealer and try their game if you want to see how much
information is readily available and how valuable it is at https://datadealer.com/ (by way of full disclosure,
our Executive Producer invested in this project).
I predict much more – first it’s adware then spyware then real ‘spook’ spyware where governments spying
on each other and their citizens, then it’s the monetization of criminal malware where more and more
citizens lose their personally identifyable information (PII) possibly followed by hidden bitcoin p2p
malware used for mining –imagine your favorite app like Angry Birds or Candy Crush, running on over
100m smartphone devices becomes a network of 100m bitcoin computations.
So, as we round a corner, we can all agree that ‘big data’ is ‘the big target’ and now stealing it through
access to smartphones and tablets will be the new wave – mobile malware is about to hit…and hit us very
hard in 2014. This means it’s time to consider not only the bring your own device dilemma (BYOD) as a
big theme for 2014 but also the core concept of mobile encryption, data protection, system hardening and
counterveillance for 2014.
To our faithful readers, Enjoy,
Pierluigi Paganini
Pierluigi Paganini, Editor-in-Chief, [email protected]
P.S. Congrats Rose Midavaine (Belgium) – this month’s contest winner!
