Hackers seek mobile phone doorway to networks

Speaking at the Websec conference in London, Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure chief research officer, said criminal hackers are developing malware that targets mobile phones as a means of getting trojans and viruses into corporate networks.

He mentioned a recent honeypot experiment at Cebit unearthed thousands of Bluetooth-enabled devices for a hacker to attack.

"With the honeypot, we saw over 100 Bluetooth devices at any given time," said Hypponen. "We logged 12,500 unique devices that had Bluetooth, had it enabled and were visible."

Hypponen said the Linux-based honeypot will now be used as the basis of a new product to stop compromised mobile phones from infecting infrastructure.

He said he wanted to develop the honeypot further and make it appear to be several different types of mobile phone at once.

"It can appear to be a Symbian or Windows-based phone so it can access incoming file transfers and even scan for mobile viruses," he said.

Hypponen added that the only problem would be to find out who had an infected phone.  However, the experiment at least would give organizations the knowledge of the presence of an infected phone on site.