TechTheDay

With all the cyber crimes, hackings, and malware-spreading happening in recent months, you’d think that you should have been hit by one of these by now. Well if you haven’t, don’t worry because in a few years your phone might get hit by an attack.

Our smartphones have basically taken over a lot of the roles computers solely used to have: from surfing the Internet to playing video games. We can even read and write documents and edit images over our phones now. The processing power of smartphones has grown exponentially over the past years as the competition between smartphone manufacturers and the advancement of technology increases. But as we start to love our smartphones as much as, if not more, than our computers and laptops we started putting more and more personal information into them. Our real names, addresses, phone numbers, possibly a video or an image of ourselves, our emails and their passwords are all stored there on our phones. And it is these personal pieces of information that cyber criminals and hackers are mostly after. Why?

The True Gold in Your Pocket

Our personal information is very valuable depending on who you ask. Cyber thieves, for example, steal our personal information to sell online, especially to identity thieves. Identity thieves buy it so they can ask for loans or apply for a service that would be under the victim’s name. To advertising agencies, personal information would mean more accurate advertising being directed to the right people. They would pay good money for it because they can profit from it. This is why our computers and our smartphones are treasure chests for these people.

And it isn’t just them that values those personal pieces of information, we do too. This is why locking people’s files and data via a ransomware is a thing. And when the target of the ransomware are huge corporations or entities, like shipping companies or the government, there’s a lot of data in their computers that are valuable and would pay good money to get those back. No one is saying that governments are going to start putting huge swathes of data into smartphones, at least not yet anyway. But you might have pieces of information that you value a lot on your smartphone, making it a prime target for future ransomware that can infect smartphones.

So Where Are They?

So why isn’t there any major attack on smartphones yet? Weirdly enough, even after Wikileak’s Vault 7 revealed that CIA’s list of hacking tools and zero-day vulnerabilities got leaked early this year, there hasn’t been one single attack anywhere. Why? Well, one could only guess that this is because it is still an emerging technology. Smartphones are relatively new, and Android OS is just a little over 11 years old. Hackers and criminals might still be in the process of “working on it” so we’ll have to wait to see what these people are planning to create. People could also take into account that because the vulnerabilities got leaked, Google has worked to fix these security holes. The new version of the Android OS, Oreo, for example, has some significant changes in the security department. Both Apple and Google take the security of their clients’ data seriously.

Conclusion

So what can we do? Basically, nothing. Technology that’s still being developed always comes with one or two bugs and those can be fatally flawed in some way and smartphones are no exception, but there’s no knowing what those bugs are. Before the Vault 7 reveal, no one was actually aware of many of those vulnerabilities existing (it’s so shocking to see that even Notepad++ was on that list). It falls on the developers to rigidly test their software’s security before any release. It also falls on the manufacturers to test their hardware as well. If you really want to secure your data, the best thing to do is to abandon online banking or putting personal information on your smartphones. But smartphones are made to be personal nowadays, they’re made so we can put out personal data into them and be assured that they’re secure.

In the end, this is a war solely between the hackers and the developers, and we are the prize caught in the middle of the crossfire.