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Your Smartphone Is Safer Than Your PC — For Now
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman reports on the future of mobile security — one that will see a significant rise in exploits as valuable information increasingly migrates to mobile devices. To date, sandboxing and code-signing have helped make mobile OSes relatively secure, when compared with their desktop brethren. But as devices store more valuable information than email, they will become more enticing to hackers currently breaking into Windows PCs. And the biggest bulls-eye appears to be on Android, in large part because its architecture is most like that of the desktop PC but also because there are so many variants in use — too many for Google or the carriers to patch securely. And as the PDF-jailbreak vulnerability showed, sandboxing has its limits when it comes to securing the browser — the most likely point of entry for exploits not due to the rise of extensions, helper objects, and plug-ins on the mobile Web."
I have a stupid phone.
So if an exploit occurs it will likely only affect some handsets as opposed to every handset.
People have such a false sense of security about their smartphones right now that the first virus or truly inventive hack is going to have a frickin' field day. iPhone users are particularly cocky about how secure their phone is (and Apple isn't exactly a speed demon when it comes to security patches for their OS's either).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Windows is an easy target because it's a huge badly-secured monoculture. How does having several different versions of Android to attack make it similarly insecure?
The problem with all of this nonsense is that there seems to be the implicit
assumption that Windows is the yardstick. Windows is the single worst thing
out there. Even all of the other desktop OSen are much less of the problem.
Clearly the dividing line isn't "desktop OS' versus 'mobile OS'.
They are really more alike then they are different.
So it used to be "PCs are bad, flee to Macs and you will be safe".
Instead now it's "PCs are bad, flee to iPods and you will be safe".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
my iPod nano's never had a virus, a worm or a trojan, but a Greek dude with a bad cold did sneeze on it once.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Personally I think this is complete nonsense. Android runs on a lot of devices - soon to be added is the Toshiba AC100 netbook, so it will run on everything from entry level phones to small computers - which involves numerous changes in UI arising from optimisation and features. But the underlying architecture should make it possible to ensure that things are properly partitioned to give a robust security model, and Google isn't exactly short of brainpower. I suspect that just as we had the Microsoft trolls trying to minimise reports of Windows security issues, here we have Apple trolls trying to find narratives to attack Android.
And no, I don't use Android.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Windows is the single worst thing out there.
Or more likely, your simply inept.
Ah ... the irony!
That's what saving throws are for.
Your iPhone needs to be made with finely ground unicorn horns, that means only the 3GS and up. The older models were made with pixie dust embedded in the circuit boards.
Trolling is a art,
I am particularly hostile: because I cant login as root! I also want to open a terminal window and SSH into my servers.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I keep hearing a lot of theories about security from the tech media like they know security. The problem is that security is a great way to scare up hits and freak people out so it's useful to write articles pandering in one direction or another, but there's rarely any true science to the articles, no figures, no statistics, no hard examples. This is because all that is boring and doesn't get hits, but it's what it takes to truly determine what is and what is not secure. Nothing is 100% secure, but then again we have this false sense of how architectures and security work. It's just BS.
This is the same kind of argument about how pundits spread the myth Macs are not any more secure than windows because hackers aren't targeting it. There's no evidence to back that statement up, and there's no evidence that Android less secure just because there are various flavors. In fact that can make it harder because one hack might not work on multiple flavors. That's even one of Androids problems now, that it's sometimes difficult to get a single app to work on multiple Android OS devices. You could then posit that the iPhone is easier to hack because the OS is so similar and the number of iOS devices in the wild is much higher than Android. But that's BS too because the iPhone is such a locked down system that in order to install anything you have to go thru the iTunes app store gatekeepers. The other way in is thru Safari, but that's really the only other way, and well now we know the security of Safari is BS because of that hole that they found in iOS 4 they used for jailbreaking. But compared to windows and compared to each other, which of these has had more critical vulnerabilities? The article gives me nothing.
Despite all this positing, it comes down to number of hacks, and what the hacks are. I could not truly begin to tell you which handhelds are more secure than others because no one, including this article, has any facts. The article eludes to "security circles" but who knows who those people are.
I think we should ban security articles from Slashdot unless they have a certain level of scientific statistics or hardcore evidence. Most articles about computer security on slashdot are not news for nerds, they are news for "platform fanboi weenies who want to start a flame war about which platform is more secure."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
http://infoworld.com/print/135570 ... You're welcome! :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
ConnectBot lets you ssh anywhere without rooting. As for root, it's not as useful as it seems once you have CyanogenMod installed.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Head over to xda-developers.com and install a rooted ROM. It's pretty easy, and they're very nice. Tend to be faster, more featureful and more stable than OEM if you pick the right one. I like AuraxTSense 7.1 on my Desire. It also adds open VPN, which is pretty nice.