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Smartphone Users Oblivious to Malware Threats

As mobile technology advances at a whirlwind pace, smartphones are becoming as powerful and capable — and as indispensible — as home computers. Yet many Web-surfing mobile phone owners still remain oblivious to the extensive amount of cyberthreats they face every day.
/ Source: SecurityNewsDaily

As mobile technology advances at a whirlwind pace, smartphones are becoming as powerful and capable — and as indispensible — as home computers. Yet many Web-surfing mobile phone owners still remain oblivious to the extensive amount of cyberthreats they face every day.

In a survey of 1,600 smartphone users in Great Britain, Italy, France and Spain, the security firm Kaspersky Lab found that respondents feel more secure (no statistic was given) accessing the Internet on their phones than on their home PCs.

One-third of smartphone users, according to Kaspersky, save login information such as PIN codes and passwords on their mobile phones, and respondents said they consider the risk of losing personal information lower on a smartphone than on a PC. It’s an interesting statistic, considering that one-fifth of those surveyed have lost a phone or had one stolen.

The findings point to “a large gap between secure reality and user perception,” Kaspersky said.

The survey results are especially alarming given the growing number of threats have hit the mobile landscape recently, including the infamous Zeus Trojan — designed to steal phone users’ bank authentication details — infected Android apps, vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS operating system for iPhones and a slew of others.

Despite these threats, smartphone users in the study still see their phones as less susceptible to danger than their computers.