Smartphone devices vulnerable to exploitation

Computer scientists at Rutgers University demonstrated how a software attack can be used to corrupt a smartphone to eavesdrop on a meeting, track the location of the owner or even activate unnecessary services to drain its battery and render the device useless. In the demonstration, the team developed a rootkit using existing software development tools and manually loaded it into a smartphone.

While the demonstration involved a smartphone, Vinod Ganapathy, assistant professor of computer science in Rutgers' School of Arts and Sciences highlighted the narrowing gap between a smartphones and laptops. Ganapathy noted that "Smartphones are essentially becoming regular computers," and that smartphones "run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or 'malware.'"

The increasing number of netbooks, laptops and tablets that incorporate mobile wireless capability could well represent an increased opportunity for hackers to remotely reach into our daily lives.

For more on this story:
- check out this press release at the Rutgers University website
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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