Mobile online crime

  • 14 July 2011
  • Reading time: 2 min
  • News

A British survey of the "Centre for Economic & Business Research" shows that payments via mobile phones and through social networking sites are particularly vulnerable to fraud, and this threatens to have a major impact on the economy. It appears that online fraud in Britain will increase by halfway this decade with 34 million EUR to 221.5 million EUR.

Three years ago, e-commerce was very sensitive to online fraud, but the last two years this plague has been reduced because the sector implemented more secure payment methods.

A good precaution to guard against payment fraud is to execute payments on websites with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates only, identified by the "https" in the address bar. With SSL visitors can exchange confidential information through a website with confidence by means of encryption. This way, malicious hackers are prevented from extracting and abusing information like credit card numbers, addresses and online transactions.

Another aspect that contributes to online safety is the operating system on your mobile device. The best known OS on the market are iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian and Android. Apps for iOS and Windows Phone are first screened for safety before they can be sold on the mobile marketplace, which is not the case with Android. Because development freedom is very important to this Open Source platform, the apps are not screened, so the online safety of every Android app that is thrown on the market cannot be guaranteed.

Since the ongoing growth of mobile Internet, the need for security rises and social media, mobile browsers and applications will be held responsible for most of the damage.

SSL support for mobile devices at Combell