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Washington, February 23
(ANI): Scientists have identified potential new security threats against new
generations of smart mobile phones that could be carried out without the
owner’s knowledge.

Computer experts at
Rutgers University demonstrated how a software attack could cause a smart phone
to eavesdrop on a meeting, track its owner’s travels, extract personal
information from phone directories or rapidly drain its battery to render the
phone useless.

Vinod Ganapathy, assistant
professor of computer science in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences, said:
“Smart phones are essentially becoming regular computers. They run the same
class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as
vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or ‘malware.’”

Ganapathy, computer
science professor Liviu Iftode and three students, based their research on a
nefarious type of malware known as “rootkits” that could lead to serious
consequences.

Iftode said: “What we’re
doing today is raising a warning flag. We’re showing that people with general
computer proficiency can create rootkit malware for smart phones. The next step
is to work on defenses.”

The findings were due to
be presented at the International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and
Applications (HotMobile 2010).

Working with Ganapathy and
Iftode were Jeffrey Bickford and Ryan O’Hare, who worked on the project as
undergraduates, and Arati Baliga, who worked on it as a postdoctoral
researcher. (ANI)