Phishers aren’t terribly picky about who falls for their deceptive schemes. It’s a numbers game and hackers will take what they can get and care little for the source.
But as Enterprise Mobile Today reports, they’re finding smartphone and tablet users are much more susceptible to their scams and, according to security software vendor Trusteer, they’re particularly successful at luring iPhone users into their web.
Trusteer’s security research team examined the log files of several web servers hosting numerous phishing sites to ascertain exactly how many people were visiting these corrupt sites, when they were visiting them and what type of computing device they were using when they did it.
Immediacy, perhaps the feature that makes mobile devices so popular, is also what makes them most vulnerable. Whether a desktop or laptop computer is in the home or at the office, it usually sits unused for large portions of the day. But a smartphone is almost always on and within arm’s reach.
“The first couple hours in a phishing attack are critical,” Trusteer CEO Mickey Boodaei said in a blog entry detailing the report. “After that many attackers are blocked by phishing filters or taken down.”