My cellphone has swine flu
2009-08-03 12:51
Few things are as traumatic as losing your cellphone. Apart from all your contact details, many phones now have everything from internet banking details to sensitive work information. But imagine if someone could steal all that information without you even realising?
On the 29th of July a couple of über nerds demonstrated how they could literally take over an iPhone simply by sending it a specially written SMS. Once the SMS had been received (not even read - just received) they could use the phone to make calls, send SMSes, download data and anything else they felt like.
If you own an iPhone you're probably thinking "OMG! WTF?" - but don't panic just yet. Those cunning fellows at Apple have already released a fix for the loophole, so just upgrade to OS 3.01 and you're safe.
And for all of you chuckling at us iPhone owning yuppie scum, another pair of phone hackers have shown how they could do similarly nefarious things to most GSM based cellphones via SMS. GSM is the most popular standard for cellphones in the world, accounting for about 80% of the market - including South Africa.
Luckily for us these are all tame hackers who revealed their secrets at an industry conference rather than by devastating millions of phones or stealing swathes of bank details. Next time we may not be so lucky.
As sensational as these revelations are, they are just the tip of a growing iceberg of cellphone viruses, trojans and spyware. The newest generation of phones are indistinguishable from computers in everything except size and that makes them just as vulnerable to hacking as our trusty desktops and laptops.
In fact some characteristics of phones make them even more vulnerable than traditional computers. Firstly their operating systems tend to be simpler and younger than their larger cousins - and thus more vulnerable. And secondly they are much more likely to be connected to the internet at all times.
Computer viruses were a relatively minor irritant until the birth of the world wide web which has made global computer pandemics a yearly occurrence since the late '90s.
Just as human viruses are spread via daily international flights, computer viruses use the net to jump from Boston to Budapest in the blink of an eye.
But computers have evolved since then, developing powerful anti-virus protection and multiple layers of security to ward off the constant assaults. Phones, though, have yet to go through that baptism of fire.
We can only hope our tame hackers are smarter and more numerous than their feral cousins. Either way we are in for a bumpy couple of years.
- Alistair is Social Media Manager at 20FourLabs.
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