Effects Of Cyber Crime And Smartphones

Cyber Crime and Smartphones

In this new age era of smartphones and cellphone technology, there exists an open market for crime. Cellphones have become more like handheld personal computers. They store vast amounts of personal and financial information. Hackers and thieves alike can gain access to your personal and banking information, or infect your phone with a virus or spyware. In the past 8-10 years, cellphones have become much more than communication devices centered on placing telephone calls or texting. Today people use cellphones much as they would a personal computer. Cellphones have gone from simple devices without screens to powerful devices capable of sharing media, watching movies, surfing the web, and participating in social media.

Because of all of the features and the use of multiple avenues of connection from 4G and Wi-Fi, to near field communications, it is becoming more and more important to have tighter security measures in place on smartphones. It has been reported that hackers have developed technology that costs approximately $1000.00 and is the size of a laptop that mimics a legitimate cellphone tower and is able to hack into your smart phone and not only steal data but infect your phone with programs allowing them to control the features of your phone. Many people download applications for their phone never paying attention to all of the permissions that they give the application. From seeing everyone in your contact list, your photos, your media, your location history, and your text messages, to what Wi-Fi you access. It is quite disturbing to know that someone has access to all of this information and even has the ability to turn your camera and microphone on and off at their leisure. Things as innocent as photographs shared on social media can provide information for criminals to use. Smartphones can tag your photographs with metadata that can include things such location,

Imagine what can be done with the near field communications. At a recent security conference it was shown how an innocuous application could be downloaded that is imbedded with a Trojan Horse application that starts to look at the area around the smart phone for any credit cards. Once the card or cards are located, it will message the attacker on their smart phone and transfer the data. Once the attacker has the data they only need find a Point of Sale machine to complete the transfer of the money. Now take into account how often your wallet and smart phone are in close proximity to each other and the estimate that there will be over 500 million near field communication payment users by 2019. I think most people can see how enormous a problem this has the ability to be. Now stop and consider the other nefarious uses of near field communication. Not just financial ones. Near field communications are also used by some businesses for time keeping for people to clock in and out of work. They are also used to allow access to secure areas instead of physical access control. In a recent Forbes article it was reported that a former U.S. Navy Petty Officer had injected a chip,