The Android ecosystem has taken the market by storm in the last few years, with hundreds of millions of devices, smartphones and tablets, already in the hands of customers, and more on the way this holiday season. As you will know if you read our recent blog post about malware trends in 2013, malicious code

If you use an Android phone you may have heard of something called the USSD vulnerability. This allows a nasty piece of malicious software to reset your Android to its factory default settings and permanently delete your data.

If the smartphones of ESET bloggers are any indication, scams executed via SMS text, known as smishing or SMS phishing, are on the rise. I don’t do a lot of texting, which makes a smish easy to spot on my phone, but I just read an amazing statistic from a Pew report: Users 18 to

…35% of iPhone/Android users in the US interact with their smartphones before they get out of bed…

As the number of apps for smartphones continues to grow, perhaps your paranoia about such apps should be growing as well. In an unusual statement, the former director of the CIA has warned that the government isn’t sharing enough information about cyber security. In an article at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/hayden-cyber/, retired four-star Gen. Michael Hayden is quoted

What would happen if every single one of the four BILLION cell phones on this planet just went dark? Or most likely, what would happen if every single cell phone went dark in one country? One scenario is a combined DoS attack on the internet was combined with a DoS attack on the cellular phone infrastructure at the same time.

I see that Bill Ray of the Register has also picked up on the iPad jailbreaking issue I blogged on yesterday.  (No, I don't suppose he read it there.) Interestingly, though, he talks much less about the security implications than about the slow take-up of  newspaper subscriptions among early adopters. Andy Greenberg, on the other hand,

Wearing my vendor-independent Apple/smartphone commentary hat, I've just posted a couple of blogs on the Mac Virus site that some of you might find of interest. OK, suit yourselves. ;-) "Touching (or Bumping) Base" addresses a mixed bag of issues: Charlie Miller's presentation on fuzzing for "20 zero-day holes … in closed source Apple products"

According to Cell-news.com, in 2007 over 850,000 Brits flushed their cell phones down the toilet. I’m sorry to report that there isn’t much a security vendor can do to help you if you flush your cell phone. ESET recently commissioned a study of smart phone users concerning mobile security. The results are interesting. A little