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Are you a game lover planning to download games on your newly acquired smart phone? Beware, you may be inviting trouble, more so if you are using the one with Android Operating System, warns security solutions company, Symantec.
The download could slither into your phone by opening up a link to a cyber thug and sending all your location information to him, warns Mr Gaurav Kanwal, Country Sales Manager (India - Consumer Products and Solutions) of Symantec.
With plethora of smart phones with Android OS swarming the market, the danger is fast assuming proportions of an epidemic. Left unattended, it could compromise safety of data on the phones. Quoting IDC figures, he said Android phones, which constituted 2.9 per cent of the smart phone market in 2009, increased its share to 9 per cent as the segment grew to 59.60 lakh phones in 2010. By 2012, Andoid OS would emerge as the second biggest mobile OS, he said.
Addressing a press conference where he announced results of a new Norton study of high-end mobile users, he said 53 per cent of users reported that they either lost their phones due to theft or otherwise.
About 77 per cent of victims considered the loss of contact information very traumatic. Of the affected Indians, one in two was concerned about the exposure or loss of private information, with 74 noting that they could neither remotely lock nor wipe the phone's memory after it was lost or stolen.
The study found that about 60 per cent used their phones for mobile banking and 51 per cent for online purchases. People stored personal information, bank card PINs and other data, Mr Gaurav said.
After stealing the data from compromised phones, cyber criminals would sell that information at a cheap rate to their peers elsewhere. “For example, credit card numbers and PIN numbers are sold for as low as Rs 25. Email ids and passwords too are sold in the underground economy. Losing such vital information could prove to be very costly,” he said.
“As smart phones become more pervasive in our lives, there is a greater need to protect the data on such devices. This is one of the reasons why Norton is taking security beyond the PC to develop solutions that protect consumers, regardless of the device they use,” he said.
Awareness was slowly building up. About 42 per cent of users in India have password-protected mobile phones. The sample size of the survey is 500.
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