The Mobile Messaging Security Problem

Mobile spam, phishing and such - how concerned are consumers?

I recently spoke with a senior executive at Cloudmark, a company that provides carriers with messaging security (spam, virus, phishing, etc.) products. In fact, they just announced their mobile solution here, MobileAuthority. I like the idea of moving this capability into the carrier's network, or the cloud in general, especially in mobile environments. Even with the thinnest of clients, such services are invaluable as long as criminals and other miscreants refuse to respect the core tenets of civilized society.

And, according to a survey performed by Harris Interactive on behalf of Cloudmark, those criminals and miscreants are having a strongly negative impact on consumers. The findings note that 44% of respondents have received spam on their mobile phones, and it's easy to target mobile phones users for this kind of nonsense. 29% reported that they've received messages on their handset asking for the disclosure of personal information. And only 21% have sent personal confidential information over the phone, likely due to a lack of trust in wireless and device security capabilities. A whopping 65% expressed concern over the security of their mobile communications. I would hope that number gets to zero at some point, but I suspect it will go higher first.

No big deal, you say? Sure, you read Network World. But the vast majority of consumers need to have confidence in the solutions they use without a technical understanding of the nature of those solutions. I think it's clear that most mobile services, like banking, can indeed be made as secure as their counterparts on the plain old stationary Web. Spam and phishing often require a little more thought on the part of the consumer, but I suspect they always will - Cloudmark and others in their space are doing a great job with countermeasures, but we can't expect perfection here. And there's little danger that the mobile Web will regardless go down in flames as a result of criminals and miscreants. But building consumer confidence is essential, and much work remains - I suspect that evil-doers will always be with us, and they're evil, not stupid.

In the meantime, I expect more carriers to adopt solutions like Cloudmark's, and I hope that broader education of the vast majority of unsuspecting and unsophisticated consumers will become common. I've got more on this, but I gotta go - I just received an SMS message that the daughter of a rich but deceased Nigerian oil baron wants me to help her move US$22 million to my personal account. Never seen that one before...

• Wireless / Mobile
• Cloudmark
• mobile messaging
• mobile security
• SMS
• spam