According to a recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald, security company Symantec is planning to release a solution for ensuring the security of mobile phone apps and they networks they connect to.
The solution will be based on the reputation-based security algorithm already used by the Norton 360 security suite to build a live database of reputable mobile apps. The database will be housed in the cloud and will be customisable according to corporate policy.
Users will then be able to download and use applications knowing they have a high reputation score. Apps already downloaded may show a warning or be centrally disabled by an IT department if their reputation score changes.
According to Symantec Research Labs vice president Joe Pasqua, “In the Android world anyone can sign their own application. Google has taken an approach that says we’ll be completely open. And what is Apple vetting for? APIs, network bandwidth use, copyright, but not necessarily from a security perspective. Even if they are, we’ve already seen how badly-developed apps for phones have brought down mobile phone towers, not intentionally, but it happened…”
Additionally, a hacker was recently able to post his phishing app–which attempted to trick users into submitting their banking details–to Google’s Android Market.
A hacker was able to successfully post his phishing app to Google’s Android Market, according to a recent article on 
What’s driving the explosion in mobile attacks is that these platforms are finally numerous enough to be worth hacker’s whiles. So, what’s the answer? When discussing back end and user-facing approaches to smartphone security, InformationWeek’s Alexander Wolfe points out a major flaw.
