Spam Goes Mobile

Lorcan Burke, CEO of AdaptiveMobile, looks at the growing problem of mobile spam

Lorcan_burke_ceo_of_adaptive_mobile
Today, email spam is as much apart of our lives as death and taxes. This year, safeguard providers such as AdaptiveMobile have been commemorating the 30th birthday of PC spam, which over the years has become a familiar and regular inconvenience to PC users at home and in the workplace.
There are many established solutions to email spam on the market, with new approaches for combating it constantly being introduced. Just last month, one vendor suggested allowing spam to reach the users PC and then allowing their new application to quarantine it on to a separate server. While this is far from an ideal solution, as it still allows potentially harmful malware on to the users device and therefore leaves users open to unnecessary risk, it illustrates that there are many varied solutions available for PC spam, and one size cannot fit all.
In recent years, a less familiar form of spam has started to creep into our lives – mobile spam. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), more than 80% of mobile phone users worldwide have received spam on their handset at some point.

Personal device
The mobile phone is a very personal device. A persons mobile is considered to be a private medium of communication, and for this reason, mobile numbers are often treated very secretively, much more so than email addresses.
It is this intimate relationship that makes the mobile phone channel so attractive from a mobile menaces perspective, enabling them to bombard mobile users anywhere, at anytime, with unsolicited messages in the form of an SMS, MMS or VMS (video message).
Although these forms of spam are relatively trivial, there are larger forms of attacks, which threaten mobile users and operators, that users are blissfully unaware of. One of the latest mobile breaches is called The Guardian, also known as Hati Hati. This is an application originally developed as a security program for handsets, but which has now been hacked and circulated round networks to make phones distribute SMS messages randomly to different numbers in vast quantities. This is causing users handsets to lose battery levels rapidly, as well as clogging up operators networks with what are essentially denials of service attacks.
When it comes to eliminating these attacks, its not as easy as blocking traditional PC spam. Mobile threats are new, and users havent got accessible ways to block them, such as downloadable PC Anti Virus software. For this reason, further procedures need to be taken to ensure users phones stay private and are not under the threat of receiving spam, malware or other foreign bodies on their handsets.

Protected networks
Today, tools are available that sit on mobile networks to provide customer protection across all mobile technologies, threats and media types. This includes protection against illegal or inappropriate content, viruses and malware. They allow mobile operators to offer parental controls to protect minors, and to extend corporate security policies through to mobile assets. They work across all mobile services (WAP, SMS, MMS, email), all forms of access (including GPRS, 3G, WiFi, WiMax) and for all media, including mobile Internet, images, music, voice and video.
It is critical that network operators investigate the different range of tools available to combat mobile spam, as otherwise, not only will they lose frustrated subscribers to competitors, but in the long-term, the profitability and viability of mobile marketing will be eroded, as subscribers become less receptive due to poor previous experiences.