New Attacks on Smart Phones

http://www.cis.syr.edu/~wedu/attack/

Scanning 2D barcodes, finding free Wi-Fi access points, sending SMS messages, listening to music, and watching MP4 videos: these are very common activities that we do using our smartphones. Can you imagine that simply doing these things can get your smarphones infected with "worms" that can not only steal personal information from your phone, but also infect your friends's phones.

Sound scary? It will not be long before worms like this spread among smartphones. What makes the attacks feasible is an emerging technology called HTML5-based app development, and it has been rapidly gaining popularity in the mobile industry. When the adoption of this technology reaches certain threshold, attacks like this will become quite common, unless we do something to stop it. A recent Gartner report says that by 2016, fifty percent of the mobile apps will be using HTML5-based technologies.

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