iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre All Vulnerable To Spear-Phishing Experiment

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Thursday, 29 October 2009 17:35

Phony LinkedIn invitation from 'Bill Gates' lands in smartphone inboxes

Oct 28, 2009 | 04:59 PM
By Kelly Jackson Higgins

Three of the most popular smartphones -- iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm Pre -- fell victim to a recent spear-phishing experiment that sent users a phony LinkedIn invitation from "Bill Gates," according to the security expert who conducted the research.
[Front page...]

[Áedán]

I think this is an attempt at drumming up business to be honest.

The "test" was sending a faked email to a user's email address, and then seeing if the phone picked up the email from the user's email account. Why wouldn't the email client on the phone pick up an email?

The article captures it all in the following:

The trouble with socially engineered, targeted attacks is that there's no real "patch" to protect products and users from falling for them.

If someone sent you a letter claiming to invite you to a party at an address, how would you determine if the letter was real or not? Apparently this man believes that somehow a smartphone should be able to tell the difference.

[Gizmo]

Yeah, this struck me as a drummed up attempt at generating news, too.