Page 3 - CDM-Cyber-Warnings-January-2014

Welcome 2014: The Year of Mobile Spying and Privacy Concerns Yes, 2014 is here and we’re surrounded by more and more personally identifyable information (PII) theft, as predicted. Keep an eye on these at http://www.privacyrights.org and find out that we all have common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) which are searchable here at the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) at http://nvd.nist.gov. In addition, as I predicted last month, we are entering a year of Mobile malware that spies on you. Why? For governments, for cybercriminals, for online predators and as part of a new attack vector used by hackers. Remember in last month’s edition, I brought up the Android Flashlight app behaving maliciously? Who would have known the NSA could be spying on you through Angry Birds? This is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s really happening out there. Why do so many people trust so many untrustworthy applications? We each want more functionality and productivity on our smartphones and tablets as a replacement for the bulky office desktop computer – as a results, we’re all willing to fall for the hook of a ‘freebie’ application – but is anything truly free in this world? Why would a calculator application need to geolocate you on GPS and eavesdrop on wifi? Why would a weather updating application need access to your contacts list, wifi, phone data protocols and GPS? The list goes on. As I said last month, 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 enter 2014, we enter 1984 coming to fruition – it’s the year of many big brothers, starting with the NSA. We should now all agree that PRIVACY is all uppercase in 2014. Yes, it matters – big time! Growing mobile spying stories leading to new concerns about your personal PRIVACY, your business PRIVACY and all IT ‘big data’ PRIVACY. To our faithful readers, Enjoy, Pierluigi Paganini Pierluigi Paganini, Editor-in-Chief, [email protected] P.S. Congrats Nadi Paranamana (Sri Lanka) – this month’s contest winner! + % %! ! & , ! . !( %+ ' "! "#+% ' - + % !& , ! % '& % & %) *"% *