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Does The Future of Mobile Security Lie in the Past?
Mary Landesman, Senior Security Researcher, Cloudmark
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 2Public
Does The Future of Mobile Security Lie in the Past?
The nature of malware and the entire computer attack spectrum has changed dramatically over the past decade.
Originally designed to be disruptive to the computer, today’s malware is no longer the end game, but rather a tool that serves as a means to a new end: criminal profiteering.
With that evolution, social manipulation has become a key facilitator in modern attacks, and messaging is the obvious medium through which it is affected.
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 3Public
Open For Attack
The always-on/always-carried nature of mobile devices enhances the potential for social manipulation.
Attacks succeed because they foster a sense of urgency. Mobile device users may be more distracted while checking or receiving messages. A recipient may act more hastily and open messages on their mobile device without thinking about the risk first.
The combination of digital criminal profiteering and mobile adoption may well be the perfect storm. Not only does widespread mobile adoption provide a steady and increasing supply of potential new victims; mobile devices are also proving to be cost effective attack tools.
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 4Public
Spam Goes Mobile
A mobile attack may simply trick the recipient into agreeing to send premium rate SMS messages. This results in expensive and unexpected charges to the victim, allowing the attacker to profit.
Social engineering factors heavily in scam and fraud campaigns and, as a result, the exact pitch, or hook, used by the scammer varies by geographical region.
Text messages are a powerful vehicle for reaching people. Currently, SMS marketers claim SMS message open rates are higher than 90 percent and opened within 15 minutes of receipt.
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 5Public
Fighting Back
Mobile devices have already proven to be favourable and cost effective, both as an attack tool and as an attack target, with social manipulation playing a key role. Further, the ease of disposal and/or replacement of mobile devices will naturally hamper law enforcement efforts and make it more difficult to thwart attacks.
Hopefully, we can all learn from past mistakes. Central to the success of traditional computer attacks was a failure to recognise or act on early indications that malware had turned to profit. Criminal attacks on mobile devices are following an accelerated path leading in the same direction.
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 6Public
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© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 7Public
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