Mobile Phones At Risk For Phishing

While Android’s open source philosophy has led to a certain amount of malware that targeted Android devices, it seems that iOS isn’t exactly invulnerable either as some studies recently have suggested that mobile phones these days, especially smartphones, are prime targets for phishers. If you don’t know what phishing is about, it’s basically a method of obtaining sensitive data i.e. user names, passwords, credit card numbers all the while pretending to be an official website of a bank, auction site, e-mail and even through instant messengers.

However as technology progressed we managed to educate ourselves by being more careful of what we click especially when opening e-mail attachments or when receiving messages from complete strangers. Browsers have also upped their security by indicating through the use of icons which websites are secure and which aren’t, which brings us to mobile phones.

Unfortunately mobile phones don’t have the same amount of security as a computer would. According to researchers at the University of California, smartphones are too small for their browsers to show as many details as you would be able to find on a computer browser and research has shown that it is almost impossible for mobile phone users to distinguish between a fake website and a real website, thanks to small screen sizes. Markus Jakobsson who is the principal scientist of consumer security at PayPal is developing a software that would work with smartphoneoperating systems called Spoof Killer, which would keep track of which applications and websites are legitimately supposed to ask for login credentials and simply block the fake ones from working.

It’s kind of scary when you think about it, kind of makes you think twice before accessing your bank’s website to log in and do some mobile banking.