This paper examines the transformative impact of smartphones on cybersecurity landscapes. As smartphone adoption surged to over 2 billion users globally by 2015, cyber criminals increasingly targeted mobile devices as lucrative attack vectors. The paper identifies three major effects: dramatic increases in mobile security breaches (cyberattacks on Android users jumped tenfold between 2013–2014), more complex exploitation techniques leveraging built-in smartphone sensors for reconnaissance and data theft, and corresponding advances in mobile security protections such as SELinux sandboxing and automated malware detection systems. The analysis demonstrates that as smartphone technology becomes ubiquitous, both security threats and defensive measures grow increasingly sophisticated, requiring continuous vigilance from security experts and user education.
"Your most intimate companion could be betraying your secrets and ripping you off" (Campbell, 2014). Smartphones are loaded with personal information and are constantly under attack by cyber criminals. Smartphones are essentially tiny computers masquerading as phones. The importance of protecting phones from cyber criminals is just as important, if not more so, than protecting home computers. The main effects smartphones are having in the cybersecurity field are a large increase in mobile security breaches, more complex hacks, and an increase in security protection software for phones.
Smartphones increased in popularity and capability very rapidly. There will be an estimated 2.04 billion people using a smartphone in 2015 according to Statista (2015). Targeting mobile phones makes more sense for cyber criminals because they can infect more devices from a single exploit. Over the course of 10 months from August 2013 to March 2014, the number of cyberattacks increased almost tenfold. Between August 2013 and July 2014, over one million Android users were attacked 3.4 million times. This was six times more than the whole previous year and a half according to a report by Kaspersky Lab and INTERPOL (2014, p. 13). The number of users is only going to increase, and we must educate those users on the dangers and prevention of cyberattacks.
Microphones, cameras, accelerometers, vibrators, light sensors, thermometers, GPS, and compasses give smartphones their "smart" capabilities. Cyber criminals are beginning to use these sensors in their exploits. For example, researchers from Indiana University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center created a program called PlaceRaider, as reported by Lemos (2013, p. 40). This program randomly takes pictures and then stitches them together to create a three-dimensional model of the smartphone user's location. Another innovative technique involves using a smartphone placed next to a keyboard. By using the built-in accelerometer, the program tracks the vibrations of individual keystrokes at a surprising 80 percent accuracy (Lemos, 2013, p. 40). These two techniques could be used together to allow criminals to obtain detailed layouts of the inside of banks, government buildings, or even private homes, complete with key codes and passwords to defeat any physical security measures. Criminals can later sell this information to other criminals or use the data themselves. There is no telling what new features will be added to smartphones, nor how they will be exploited against users.
In cybersecurity, major security breaches of computer systems are always followed by an increase in security measures. This holds true for smartphones as well. A feature of Google's Android operating system is its use of SELinux, or Security-Enhanced Linux, since version 4.3 (Android, 2014). This runs every process in a sandboxed environment where each process and its data is isolated from one another. However, this isolation causes another problem: third-party security programs are also sandboxed, so their effectiveness is greatly reduced compared to desktop computers. Google's Android operating system has started using an automated malware detection system called AMDA that uses behavioral analysis (Abela, Angeles, Raynier, Tolentino, & Miguel, 2013, p. 2). AMDA determines malicious behavior from normal operation through machine learning techniques. This will give Android the ability to detect zero-day exploits before they become widespread.
Smartphones are under attack due mainly to their ever-increasing popularity. The ever-growing base of users and manufacturers need to be aware of proper security methods to protect themselves from cyber criminals. Smartphones will continue to gain even more sensors and technology that will draw increasingly inventive ways to exploit them. These exploits will be nearly impossible to predict. Security experts must stay vigilant and continue to improve the general security of smartphone operating systems while developing increasingly sophisticated detection techniques.
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