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Prepare for an onslaught of mobile phone attacks in 2011
The CEO of McAfee has issued a statement during a keynote address yesterday, telling everyone to prepare themselves for an imminent mobile app threat next year. In the past, protecting email was the major security concern associated with smartphones and most people were using feature phones that had no access to third party apps anyway. But now that smartphones have become commonplace all over the world, especially in America, it’s time to prepare for a bigger threat. Most phones don’t have any anti-virus software to help keep them protected from malicious threats, and people have been taking that for granted. Granted, there are security measures such as the screening process of the app stores, and kill switches, but it is also up to consumers to protect themselves, because when someone discovers a way to get past security, (like the recent Angry Birds imitation Android app) it will be quickly exploited. How many of you are aware of your phone’s security?
The title says it all, and that was pretty quick. It was only yesterday when the iOS 5 was announced and the beta was made available to developers but yet wasting little to no time, hackers MuscleNerd and Co have managed to jailbreak iOS 5 on the iPod touch fourth generation. The exploit they used was the limera1n jailbreak which means that iOS 5 presented the hackers with little surprises when it came to closing the loop holes that would make the limera1n exploit work.
Naturally the iOS 5 is currently in beta which means there are probably still plenty of holes to be exploited and we can only assume that in the final release iOS 5 would-be hackers will have a harder time trying to jailbreak it. However this is good news for those on jailbroken devices who were worried that they might be in for a rather long wait when it comes to getting the jailbroken version if iOS 5 on their devices.
Anyone who has owned an iOS device knows that upon out of the box, the first thing they see is their device asking them to tether it to their computer in order to set up synch with iTunes. Not necessarily a bad thing but what if the person’s computer was not well equipped enough to run iTunes properly or what if they didn’t know what all these synching meant?
Tabbed browsing isn’t new. In fact there are browser apps already available for iOS that features tabbed browsing, but either way we are happy that Apple has decided to sit up and take notice of what users want in their browsers and finally implemented tabbed browsing in their native iOS browser app, Safari.