It’s not much of a surprise, but a new Symantec report suggests that baddies are increasingly targeting mobile devices like your shiny smartphone and tablet.
The report was actually pretty scary, as Symantec says that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are also under attack, in addition to the traditional means like e-mail phishing and others. The mobile bit says:
While the new security architectures employed in today’s mobile devices are at least as effective as their desktop and server predecessors, attackers can often bypass these protections by attacking inherent vulnerabilities in the mobile platforms’ implementations. Unfortunately, such flaws are relatively commonplace — Symantec documented 163 vulnerabilities during 2010 that could be used by attackers to gain partial or complete control over devices running popular mobile platforms. In the first few months of 2011 attackers have already leveraged these flaws to infect hundreds of thousands of unique devices.
Symantec is responding with a multitude of apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices. This space should continue to grow as more and more users transition to smartphones are their primary computing devices.
[Via Symantec]