Spammers Have Your Number By Roger Crockett
November 26, 2007 -- We've all been deluged by annoying, unsolicited e-mails: an offer for free Viagra or a job that "guarantees" a $1 million paycheck. Deleting spam from the office PC is a morning ritual that ranks right up there with standing in a long line at the coffee shop. But it's about to get much worse: Spam is creeping onto an even smaller screen, your cell phone.
Steadily, more text and voice spam are invading handsets. Wireless users in the U.S. will receive about 1.1 million spam text messages this year, up 38% from 2006, estimates messaging specialist Ferris Research. By next year, mobile spam messages are expected to hit 1.5 million. That's far from an epidemic--it pales next to the 250 million Americans who use wireless services--but security experts and wireless consultants warn that phone spam will grow in coming years. Viruses and surreptitious code that monitors a phone's use may be next. "Wireless phones are a brand-new attack target for the hackers," says Tom Bowers, senior security evangelist with Kaspersky Lab, a software vendor. Read more...
