Mobile World Congress, the largest and most important mobile conference of the year, starts this week in Barcelona. Meanwhile, about 6000 miles away in San Francisco, the RSA Conference brings together cryptographers and security geeks. These conferences, while seemingly unrelated, have more in common in 2012 than ever before. Juniper created an exclusive infographic for ReadWriteWeb encapsulating the colliding worlds of mobility and security. Check it out below.
There has been some type of derivative of mobile malware since the first “smart” devices arrived on the market. If we want to stretch the definition of smart, that means the first Palm and BlackBerry handsets became targets of malicious hackers in the early 2000s. For instance, Palm personal digital assistants were hit with Trojans that forced a reset of the device in 2002. Mobile viruses came to be in 2004, mostly delivered through games.
The real rise of mobile malware came with the onset of the touch screen smartphone. Malicious hackers immediately realized that the data stored on smartphones is as valuable (if not moreso) than that on a computer. Contacts lists, direct access to funds, emails, texts, photos and call logs are rich data that can be used in a variety of ways to make malicious hackers money. In 2011, mobile malware increased 155%. Android malware increased by 3,325%, with much of that growth coming in the second half of the year.
See the simple timeline of the infographic below. We will be monitoring both RSA and MWC this week, tracking the trends in each industry.
