BARCELONA: Smartphones are under a growing menace from cyber-criminals seeking to hack into web-connected handsets, but the mobile industry has contained the threat so far, security experts said. Software security firms warned at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that the increasingly popular smartphones could face an explosion of virus attacks in the coming years. “Tomorrow we could see a worm on phones which would go around the world in five minutes,” said Mikko Hyppoenen, chief research officer at F-Secure, which makes anti-virus software for mobile phones. “It could have happened already. It hasn’t, but it could happen. And I do think that sooner or later it will happen, but when? Well that I cannot tell you,” he said. But security companies, mobile operators and makers of operating systems have found solutions to limit the attacks so far and delay an onslaught of spam and viruses, he said. “It won’t work forever, eventually we will see the first global outbreak. But we have been able to delay it by more than five years, at least,” he said.
Source: The Post