Smart Phone Attacks on the Rise.... If You Have an Android Phone

Antivirus vendor McAfee recently released its 3rd Quarter Threat Report and, in it, they revealed that Android-based smart phones were the ONLY tergeted smart phones for first time in the past quarter. Also, its not just that it was only moble OS to be attacked, but attacks on the OS were up by 37% quarter over quarter! To be clear, there were no malware attacks on the iPhone IOS, Blackberries, or Windows phones.

Why? Well, obviously Android's popularity makes it a target. But, it's more than that. Android's more relaxed approach to security is also a large part of the problem. You can load apps on your Andorid phone from anywhere - not just from manufacturer controlled app stores.  Android is "open source" which means anyone can update it.

Of course, Google (the maker of Android), reacted furiously by claiming that McAfee and other software vendors were sowing fear in order to sell their security products. No doubt, there is some truth to that as well.

So, what to do? If you have an iPhone, Blackberry or Windows phone, don't worry about buying antivirus software for it just yet. But, if you own an Android phone, you just might want to check into that.

See the link below for the McAfee report.

http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/reports/rp-quarterly-threat-q3-2011.pdf