Malware Goes Mobile

Image via Wikipedia

Two new stories by ZDNet caught my eye today. The first is a story about a piece of malware which attacks Symbian-based phones (most Nokia phones use some version of this operating system) by pretending to be a legitimate piece of third-party software and spreads through SMS messages. This was news to me as I didn't realize that mobile malware was so common (this was the latest of many Symbian viruses and differs from them only by being more transmissable). This is an unfortunate but development arising from the fact that phones have gotten so much more powerful these days.

The second story interested me mainly because I recently wrote something about this recently. Basically, you had a group of websites which got flagged by Google as malicious because the advertising network which they use was flagged as potentially carrying malicious code. And ironically enough, the advertising network claims that their ads were clean and that only website was attacked. Either way, it all adds up to a headache for everyone involved; users, website operators, and ad providers alike.

These stories caught my attention in part because they have become so commonplace. Our happy high-bandwidth Internet with its mobile access and fancy web apps is fun and exciting but it also creates new avenues for the bad guys to attack us.