Mobile Security

The Finland-based security firm F-Secure is warning companies to beware of Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant app that last month was banned by IBM for security purposes.The potential for Siri-based data disclosures was cited at a Helsinki press conference, in which F-Secure’s vice president, Maria Bordgren, said that Apple’s lack of known corporate security policies leave enterprises vulnerable. Siri queries and other information are stored as text in Apple’s data centers.

As smartphone technology evolves so does the way we access and interact with the Internet. Today your smartphone is used both as a phone and a computer. For many users, in 3-5 years your smartphone will also become your wallet. With new applications being developed daily, the mobile payments market is expected to reach unprecedented  growth by 2014. As this market rapidly expands, is security taking a back seat to technology?

The Facebook security team is adding some new security features to the social network’s mobile applications, including upgrades to the login mechanism and account recovery options.

Google’s Android platform has become the most popular mobile operating system both among consumers and malware writers, and the company earlier this year introduced the Bouncer system to look for malicious apps in the Google Play market. Bouncer, which checks for malicious apps and known malware, is a good first step, but as new work from researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller shows, it can be bypassed quite easily and in ways that will be difficult for Google to address in the long term.

Combine the rapid adoption of mobile devices with the behavior of some companies developing applications for them, and what do you get? A pocket-sized, portable privacy liability. Veracode explores the consequences of rampant data-mining and the importance of finding the balance between function and privacy in this infographic published today.

Apple has released a detailed security guide for its iOS operating system, an unprecedented move for a company known for not discussing the technical details of its products, let alone the security architecture. The document lays out the system architecture, data protection capabilities and network security features in iOS, most of which had been known before but hadn’t been publicly discussed by Apple.

A group of developers has released a new untethered jailbreak for devices running iOS 5.1.1. The hack allows users to run unsigned apps on their devices, something that Apple doesn’t like so much.