As world worries about Heartbleed

As world worries about Heartbleed, experts warn of big threat to smartphones

LONDON: While the world worries about the deadly online bug Heartbleed, a new threat has emerged that can cause havoc to our smartphones.

Heartbleed is jumping between computers but cyber protectors have warned that smartphones will be the next big target - infected with worms that can not only steal personal information from your phone but can also infect your friend's phones.

All major mobile systems will be affected, including Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone because they all support HTML5-based mobile apps.

Scanning 2D barcodes, finding free Wi-Fi access points, sending SMS messages, listening to music and watching MP4 videos: these are very common activities that we do using our smartphones.Cyber experts have now warned that the next big virus will hit the smartphone while we indulge in precisely these activities.

Experts have warned that it is not long before worms like this spread among smartphones. What makes the attacks feasible is an emerging technology called HTML5-based app development, and it has been rapidly gaining popularity in the mobile industry.

"When the adoption of this technology reaches certain threshold, attacks like this will become quite common, unless we do something to stop it. A recent Gartner report says that by 2016, 50% of the mobile apps will be using HTML5-based technologies," experts said.

A notorious problem of the HTML5-based technology is that malicious code can be easily injected into the program and get executed.

That is why the Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack is still one of the most common attacks in the Web. XSS attacks can only target at web applications through a single channel (the Internet), but with the adoption of the same technology in mobile devices, we have found out that a similar type of attack can not only be launched against mobile apps, it can attack from many channels, including 2D barcode, Wi-Fi scanning, Bluetooth pairing, MP3 songs, MP4 videos, SMS messages, NFC tags and contact lists.
As long as an HTML5-based app displays information obtained from outside or from another app, it may be a potential victim.

3 things to do to protect from Heartbleed

The "Heartbleed" bug has caused anxiety for people and businesses. Now, it appears that the computer bug is affecting not just websites, but also networking equipment including routers, switches and firewalls.

The extent of the damage caused by the Heartbleed is unknown. The security hole exists on a vast number of the Internet's Web servers and went undetected for more than two years. Although it's conceivable that the flaw was never discovered by hackers, it's difficult to tell.

There isn't much that people can do to protect themselves completely until the affected websites implement a fix. And in the case of networking equipment, that could be a while.

Here are three things you can do to reduce the threat:

- Change your passwords. This isn't a full-proof solution. It'll only help if the website in question has put in place required security patches. You also might want to wait a week and then change them again.

- Worried about the websites you're surfing? There's a free add-on for the Firefox browser to check a site's vulnerability and provide color-codes flags. Green means go and red means stop. You can download it here.

- Check the website of the company that made your home router to see if it has announced any problems. Also be diligent about downloading and installing and software updates you may receive.

Source: http://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/digital-security

For more information please check http://www.heartbleed.com/