Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Reading the essay titled Exploiting the iPhone on the website of security firm Independent Security Evaluators, two things are crystal clear. First, the iPhone is actually a computer. Second, Apple is about to get a taste of the security nightmares that have plagued Microsoft for the past 13 years since the Internet went mainstream.
The fact of the matter is that it took some
security experts all of two weeks to demonstrate that the iPhone is
just as vulnerable to malicious attacks as any other computer that
connects to the Internet.
In fact, given that the iPhone is first and foremost a communications
device, it could even pose a potentially greater security risk than
most computers.
For nearly two years, security experts such as Mikko Hypponen of
F-Secure have been warning of a coming explosion of spam botnets
working through the address books in mobile phones to send millions of
costly SMS messages worldwide. Given the cost of sending SMS messages,
having your phone recruited into an SMS spam botnet is an even scarier
thought than having your computer hijacked by spammers.
The iPhone, however, is different from ordinary mobile phones in that
it has the potential to become the first widely used pocket consumer
Internet device.
Armed with a full strength Safari browser, users are free to visit
malicious websites and click on email links that will take them to
places better left unvisited. That could potentially expose the phone
side of the device to Hyponnen's nightmare.
With the iPhone predicted to become a game changer and possibly the
most popular mobile communications device to date, it is sure to become
a target for malware purveyors. The fact is that the iPhone is a great
portable Internet device and it is going to be widely used for that
purpose. Now that it has been exposed as being as vulnerable through
its browser, the hackers will be out in force.
No doubt Apple is already working on a patch to plug the hole in Safari
discovered by Independent Security Evaluators. However, as the security
firm rightly points out, there are likely to be many more
vulnerabilities in the iPhone, whether they be in Safari or other
applications - just as there are with any Internet connected computer.
As I write this article, my computer's security software has informed
me of a number of spam emails I have received containing infectious
malware. Is there any reason to think that security software for
iPhones will not soon also be mandatory? Is there any reason to think
that as more vulnerabilities are exposed that Apple will not be forced
to push out its own cyclical fixes to users a la Microsoft's Patch
Tuesday?
One would hope that this scenario does not unfold. However, when we
think of what we use our mobile phones for and the additional
capabilities of the already immensely popular iPhone, it is hard to
imagine that malware purveyors are not already working on their first
exploit, perhaps waiting for the day when the iPhone becomes as
ubiquitous as the iPod.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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