We received notice of the 2009 McAfee Mobile Security Report today from our fellow SANS collegues, so I decided to check it out.

This report, basically is on the security of Mobile Devices, as the name of the report implies.  However, the report does not define what a "Mobile Device" is.  One will look at the term "Mobile Device" and instantly think of things like the Blackberry, iPhone, and Nokia smartphone platforms.  However, with the rising prevalence of Mobile Computing, there are things like laptops with built in 3G, devices like the Nokia N800/N810 Internet Tablets, or the rising use of so-called Netbooks, one might argue that these fall into the category of Mobile Devices as well.  While the report doesn't exactly specify what a "Mobile Device" is, the report seems to imply that its talking about Smartphones.

There really isn't anything incredibly groundbreaking in this report, except for the chart on the left of page 2. 

This chart details the amount of report Mobile Security issues, it's a simple bar graph of comparisons between 2006, 2007, and 2008.  Each year, steadily increasing in the following areas:

Network or Service capacity issues

Virus/Spyware Infections

Voice or Text Spam Attacks

Third Party Application

Loss of User Data

Phishing Attacks

Privacy issues

Denial of Service Attacks

Now you can attribute this to the fact that maybe people are getting better at reporting security issues, or there are more mobile devices out there now (with the past year seeing a large uptick in number, look at the number of iPhones sold alone!), or there really is a rise in these numbers.  However you want to interpret these numbers, there is no denying that there is an increase in the amount of attacks facing our "Mobile Devices". 

I don't want to reiterate the entire report, so I'll point to it here.  Go read for yourself, enjoy!

-- Joel Esler http://www.joelesler.net