Five ways to protect your smartphone

Wave your smartphone; buy a latte. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But before running off to participate in Silicon Valley’s next new thing, you might want to think about a scary downside to mobile commerce: the vulnerability of smartphones to hackers.

A new report by McAfee, a vendor of anti-virus software, says that better security around networks has prompted hackers to seek new targets, and the mobile app store is one of the most tempting. Because the market for Android apps is less controlled than Apple’s App Store, security researchers have seen a rash of attacks against that platform this year. With the exception of phones using the long-established Symbian platform, Android devices were the most likely to be targeted during the first three months of this year, according to the report.

In March, a researcher who posts on the Reddit security site under the name Lampolo found that more than 50 applications available via the official Android Market contained malware; the booby-trapped apps may have been downloaded up to 200,000 times. One nasty trick that Lampolo noticed involved pulling a legitimate app off the Android Market, inserting malware into it and then publishing it on another site with a similar name. Super Guitar Solo for example was originally Guitar Solo Lite, a legitimate app. It’s worth noting that Google removed the bogus app from the Android Market very quickly and posted a tool to help users recover from the attack, according to the McAfee report.