Smart Phone, Dumb Security

Abstract

Over one-third of Americans use a smartphone daily and recently there has been a substantial increase in the incidents of malicious software on these devices. Smartphones, being just miniature computers, suffer from the kinds of hacker exploits that were prevalent in the early days of the proliferation of the PC. However, the differences in the ecosystem of these phones with Android being open, Apple which is closed but can be opened and BlackBerry which is completely closed and encrypted, has a profound effect on the security of these devices.