After coming out of Beta toward the end of December, avast! Free Mobile Security has gained much attention. These guys are offering everything the other anti-virus/security apps bring to the table and then some. Complete with root features (yes, you heard that right), this is the fullest security app we have ever used. All for a price everyone can afford – free.
We’ve recently been talking about the idea of anti-virus apps in the Android ecosystem. A Googler has even gone into detail, mentioning that “virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you BS protection software for Android, RIM and iOS.” He then goes on to call them charlatans and scammers.
There are two main types of dangers, though: malware/phishing (rare, but possible) and physically loosing your device. Android holds a huge market and may become a main target soon. This is why Windows users are at more danger than other PC operating systems.
Owning an Android smartphone comes with great responsibilities. These gadgets are not only nice and expensive, but their value extends to its power. These are very powerful devices and usually hold information that should not fall into the wrong hands, whether it be physically or virtually. One of the apps that best protects you happens to be avast! Mobile Security, so let’s take a look at its features.
Virus Protection
While not the most exciting (because all other competing apps offer it), this is the main function of the avast! app. There are certain apps or files that will put your device and private information at risk. There are many who believe smart app-shopping can get rid of such worries.
It is definitely good to read app reviews, stick to official app stores (avoid piracy), revise the permissions and make sure you do not download a “fake” app. These practices will put you in a safe position, but many users are not always that attentive. Even if they are, there’s always a small risk.
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Below are the eleven most popular news stories aggregated by PI Newswire in 2011 based on traffic and page views related to smartphone, iphone and mobile phone security.
Warning: Smart phone images use GPS trackers to mark your location
http://bit.ly/vWSbln
Smartphone Security: Hacker says ‘Don’t scan that QR code!’
http://bit.ly/skFpmd
10 ways to secure your smartphone
http://bit.ly/sgsFny
FBI warns parents about smart phones
http://bit.ly/rLanGt
Android/iPhone app used by private investigators allows spoofed caller ID calls to be made
http://bit.ly/sZpqkh
iSpy Conspiracy: Your iPhone Is Secretly Tracking Everywhere You’ve Been
http://bit.ly/snfYEK
iPhone vs. Blackberry – Cheaters Beware
http://bit.ly/snn4DP
The top 10 passcodes you should never use on your iPhone
http://bit.ly/tJHxWR
How police have obtained iPhone, iPad tracking logs
http://bit.ly/vgBaMJ
Army Taps Android Phones for ‘Wearable Computers’
http://bit.ly/ootMwx
99% of Android phones leak secret account credentials
http://bit.ly/vNy4lq
Call Chicken Little! The sky is falling! Our smartphones are tracking our every move! Big Brother is real! Or wait: There’s no reason to worry about a loss of privacy, because as we move into 2012, privacy doesn’t exist anymore — right?
For most of the past year, the news has been full of stories about smartphones loaded with secret software that tracks our keystrokes or follows our every move.
But the truth is that if you own and use a cellphone, you’ve already given up a good part of your personal privacy. Your cellular carrier — and the government, if it asks for it — already has a record of every number you’ve ever dialed, every text-message you’ve ever sent, all the places you’ve ever been and, if you’ve got a smartphone, every website you’ve ever visited.
Most people may not be aware of this. That may be why the recent discovery of a diagnostic software program called Carrier IQ transformed what once were standard privacy concerns into full-blown paranoia.
To recap, an amateur Android hacker in Connecticut found Carrier IQ on his phone in November, grew concerned about what it did, discovered that it was secretly installed on millions of smartphones and began to raise technical questions online. The Carrier IQ company threatened to sue him.
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When Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook last week requesting that the app “Drivers License” be removed from the App Store, the company quickly jumped into action and by late Sundy night the app was gone.
Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., was convinced that the free iPhone app which allows users to create fake driver’s licenses for entertainment purposes, posed a threat to public safety and national security. The high-risk app which had comfortably resided in the App Store since October of 2009 became public enemy number one overnight. While Pennsylvania battles through an 8.1 percent unemployment rate, Senator Casey is busy rescuing America from dangerous iPhone apps.
“By downloading ‘License’, anyone with an iPhone or iPad can easily manufacture a fake driver’s license by taking a photo and inserting it into one of fifty state driver’s licenses’ templates,” Senator Casey, wrote in his letter to Apple.
“Users then have a high quality image resembling an actual driver’s license which they can easily print, laminate, and use for any number of illegal and fraudulent activities.”
Surprisingly, DriversEd.com, developers of the banished app, are not embittered by Apple’s choice to dismantle their little ticking time bomb or by Senator Casey’s campaign to protect public safety one app at a time. I spoke to Gary Tsifrin, COO at Drivers Ed, to get his take on this developing crisis.
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Keeping your little sweet ones safe while they trick-or-treat just got easier. You can now track sex offenders using phone apps on your I-phone or Android. For I-phones, you can download “Sex Offender Tracker by been verified.com. For Androids, you can download the “Life 360″ app.
The “Life 360″ app for droid phones is free and uses GPS tracking to show users exactly where a sexual offender lives, what they were charged with, and their proximity.
Kendra Morris is a mother of two kids. Morris said, “I think as long as it’s public record than it’s a smart tool to use.
Father of one, Robert Wailes said,”These apps let you know where the danger might lie. Halloween is a kid-oriented holiday so I think any precaution you take to keep your kids safe is a good thing.”
The information on these apps come from the state registry of sex offenders. Experts with the New Orleans Children’s Advocacy Center said apps like these can be helpful tools, but sadly, usually it’s someone the kids know who sexually abuse them.
Many parents are still willing to do whatever it takes to protect their kids.
“I might check it out, possibly,” Wailes said.
“I am sure my husband will download it,” Morris said.
View source…
A team of researchers has discovered a way to log keystrokes from computers simply by placing an iPhone 4 near a user’s keyboard and monitoring the keyboard’s vibrations.
The team at Georgia Tech used the accelerometer in an iPhone 4 to sense keyboard vibrations and determine what was being typed, without any connectivity to the user’s computer or peripherals.
As documented in their paper, “(sp)iPhone: Decoding Vibrations From Nearby Keyboards Using Mobile Phone Accelerometers”, the researchers could decipher complete sentences with up to 80 per cent accuracy, using a dictionary of about 58,000 words.
“We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read,” said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, “but then we tried an iPhone 4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise, and the results were much better.”
However, it’s not just the iPhone that can be used in the attack. Traynor believes that most smartphones made in the past two years would be sophisticated enough to launch an attack.
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A team of researchers at Georgia Tech have demonstrated how they were able to spy on what was typed on a regular desktop computer’s keyboard via the accelerometers of a smartphone placed nearby.
Normally when security researchers describe spyware on smartphones, they mean malicious code that can be used to snoop on calls, or to steal the data held on mobile phones.
In this case, however, researchers have described how they have put software on smartphones to spy on activity *outside* the phone itself – specifically to track what a user might be doing on a regular desktop keyboard nearby.
It sounds like the stuff of James Bond, but the researchers paint a scenario where a criminal could plant a smartphone on the desk close to their target’s keyboard and use specialist software to analyse vibrations and snoop on what was being typed.
It’s a quite beautiful twist on how bad guys could use microphones to “hear” keystrokes and spy on your passwords.
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How do you like those Apples?
An unnamed New Yorker claims Apple’s new “Find My Friends” app — which uses GPS to locate any of your friends that have allowed you access to their location — led to a stunning revelation: His wife has been cheating on him.
“I got my wife a new 4S and loaded up Find My Friends without her knowing. She told me she was at her friend’s house in the East Village. I’ve had suspicions about her meeting this guy who lives uptown. Lo and behold, Find my Friends has her right there.”
The user claims his wife told him she was going to the Meat Packing District, a location in the lower West Side of Manhattan. Instead, the Find My Friends feature indicates the woman was on 2nd and 65th St. — a far different neighborhood that would be difficult to confuse.
“She said she is in meat packing district which is on 12th street. I don’t think so,” the user wrote, uploading screen shots to the website that appear to corroborate his story.
Others were quick to doubt the post by “ThomasMetz,” who appears to have created the user account just to post this single story.
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“iPhone users would be stunned to learn the amount of recoverable data we can get,” says Mark McLaughlin of Los Angeles based Computer Forensics International. “When you hit delete it doesn’t necessarily mean that message, text, or picture is gone forever. You’re just telling the iPhone, don’t show it to me anymore and it flags that deleted data so it can be overwritten. So depending on the activity after the deletion, we may be able to bring it back like it was never deleted.”
DEA Computer Forensics Examiner Stephen Marx testified in the Michael Jackson Death Trial that he found e-mails the defendant Dr. Conrad Murray had sent hours before Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009. Not only did Marx recover critical timeline e-mails, he also discovered digital medical charts thought to be non-existent. But the key piece of evidence was a damaging audio recording of an impaired Michael Jackson reportedly made by Murray.
Computer forensic examiners like McLaughlin, routinely use very sophisticated software tools on civil and criminal cases. They start by first making a copy of the iPhone’s entire memory—which includes active and deleted data. This exact copy doesn’t disturb the original data which makes the examination forensically sound and admissible in court. Then the copy can be searched either visually or by using keywords. The recovered data is ultimately put into known iPhone categories and displayed.
McLaughlin says, “Our SmartPhone forensic capabilities have improved exponentially. But it stands to reason because they’re just pocket computers, and we’ve been searching them successfully for nearly 20 years now. So I guess people need to realize that if it’s there, we’re usually going to find it.”
View source…
A little more light has been shed on the odd story of Apple losing another iPhone prototype in a Bay Area bar.
The man who’s home was searched by what he believed to be San Francisco Police Department officers was Bernal Heights resident Sergio Calderón, SF Weekly discovered. And the police officers? They may have been investigators working for Apple who were actually impersonating police officers.
Impersonating a police officer is a misdemeanor in California, and is punishable by up to a year of jail time. Another option is that Apple was working with police officers, and a proper report was never filed. When the SFPD has been called and asked about the Apple incident, representatives said they had no knowledge of the search.
“This is something that’s going to need to be investigated now,” SFPD spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield told SF Weekly. “If this guy is saying that the people said they were SFPD, that’s a big deal.”
On Wednesday CNET News.com reported that in late July an Apple representative lost a “priceless” next generation iPhone prototype in San Francisco bar Cava 22. Apple reportedly used GPS to track the phone to a Bernal Heights area home, where police officers were given permission to search the home for the device. The resident was offered money by Apple for the iPhone’s safe return, but it was not turned in. The phone was sold on Craigslist for $200, according to CNET, but no independent evidence of the post has surfaced.
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I was intrigued when I read about some cool new features that may be coming soon to Apple’s Find My iPhone feature on MacRumors. Having lost and recovered my iPhone after an incident in Orlando* thanks to Find My iPhone, I’m a little extra sensitive to the issue.
If your not familiar, Find My iPhone is a free feature for anyone with an iPhone 4, iPad, or 4th generation iPod touch that allows you to locate your device via GPS simply by going to me.com/find. It’s an extremely powerful feature that you need to enable right away if you haven’t already. Take it from me, it can save you a lot of money and grief.
Patently Apple uncovered a new Apple patent application that details some new security features that could be coming soon to Find My iPhone. According to the application, Apple is looking at new ways to detect unauthorized usage while providing the user with much more control of how an iOS device can be used when reported lost or stolen.
Some of the features mentioned in the application:
•Proactively increase the security level on an iOS device if multiple failed password attempts are detected. Under the increased security level, files or other content stored on the mobile device could be selectively protected.
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From minor crimes to major cases, law enforcement is faced with the proper handling and analysis of these devices.
You see them everywhere, cellular phones and handheld devices (smart phone, BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.). They are a part of our world’s culture. Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, remarked in a recent radio interview, “…cell phones are selling like crazy in rural India…farmers are buying them before they put a toilet in their house…” Additionally, recent news reports indicate that, statistically, 90% of all Americans own a cellular phone. Having this kind of societal importance and wide distribution, it is not surprising that cellular phones and handheld devices are being widely used in even the most minor criminal activity. These devices can provide significant evidence in major cases. This article will discuss considerations for law enforcement in the handling and analysis of these devices.
Not so long ago, a cellular phone had a rudimentary call history, phone book, and messaging system containing both text and voice messages. Now these handheld devices can be as complex as small computers. Even the least complex model can contain sophisticated multimedia messaging, Internet access, integrated global positioning system (GPS) functions, data connectivity, etc. These functions can provide a wealth of information to law enforcement.
Cellular phones operate on radio frequency (RF) protocols. When a cellular phone is turned on, it searches for the strongest signal, usually from the nearest cellular tower, or the one having the best line of sight. As the device is transported, it will continue searching and adjusting to utilize the tower with the strongest signal. The designation of the most recently connected tower is recorded as a database entry in the cellular phone file system. Moving to a new area will cause this entry to be updated. With an active connection to the system, service providers can utilize low call volume periods to update phone connection (roaming) and file system software. These updates can have an impact on the stored data on a device.
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