How to lock down your Android and lock out malware

Have you ever thought about all the personal information stored on your smartphone or tablet?

I mean, really thought about everything you save so that it's always at your fingertips? 

Then think about how well protected that information is.

You may not care if your list of favorite wines goes public, but what if someone were to copy your spouse’s driver’s license and Social Security numbers?

Millions of people have such data stored in their smartphones or tablets. Because mobile devices are so easy to lose or have stolen, all data on them is at substantial risk.

With Android devices, there's additional danger. They've been plagued by shoddy security and malicious apps.

Cybercrooks are getting bolder and more creative with those apps every day. Just as you think you're one step ahead of the crooks, they come up with a new way to steal your personal information.

That’s why it's vital for every Android user to learn how to lock down and protect his or her device.

Keep out the digital thievesRight now, malicious apps, which often pretend to be cheaper versions of popular apps or games, are the No. 1 risk for Android devices.

"Malicious applications targeted for Android devices [have] increased between 400 to 1,000 percent in the past 18 to 24 months," said Jerry Irvine, chief information officer of Prescient Solutions in Schaumburg, Ill.

"These malicious applications perform multiple tasks, but share one common goal — to attain the personal information on these mobile devices and push it out to criminal entities."

Malware can also be installed on an Android device in other ways, such as through websites, emails, text messages or even NFC (near-field communication) file transfers.

To best protect your phone from malware, Irvine said, download anti-virus and malware-scanning apps designed for Android devices.

Most of the better known anti-virus software companies have security apps available. Chances are you can stick with the brand you like best.

Be sure to upgrade the anti-virus software when prompted, since new malware is being released every day.

[10 Tips to Keep Your Android Phone Safe]

And the human onesBut malware isn't the only threat to the personal data on your smartphone or tablet. If the device is lost or stolen, the data's in someone else's hands.

You should consider installing a security product that regularly backs up the data on your device to a cloud-storage service — and also has a location detector and the ability to remotely wipe personal data if the device is gone for good.

The first line of defense, however, is to protect your device with a PIN, password or pattern lock. That way, no one can randomly pick it up and start checking your email.

"Passwords and PIN configurations on mobile devices can be configured to entirely wipe the device if the password is not entered correctly within a specific number of times," Irvine said.

"The security should be configured.  Strong passwords of eight or more characters should be used because they make it much harder to crack the password."

Keep your password, PIN or lock pattern truly secret by regularly wiping your device's screen clean. Repeated finger gestures will smear the glass, leaving smudge patterns that can tip off a thief.

Theft of smartphones and tablets is on the rise. Thieves have been known to swipe phones out of the hands of users who were still talking.

While these thieves may be primarily interested in the street value of the device, your unprotected data is always going to be at risk.

Considering how we use our smartphones and tablets (and got rid of address books and other tools that held our vital numbers), it's futile to recommend keeping all personally identifiable information off our gadgets.

Instead, keep the amount of such information on your device to a minimum, and make sure your phone has multiple layers of security.

• 8 Simple Tips for Securing Your Computer
• Got Money? You're a Prime Target for Identity Thieves
• 10 Best Smartphones for 2013

Copyright 2013 TechNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company.

Ripple effects across Web as spam-blocking group Spamhaus hit by record-smashing cyberattack

       By Associated Press,

LONDON — A record-breaking cyberattack targeting an anti-spam watchdog group has sent ripples of disruption coursing across the Web, experts said Wednesday.
Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world’s inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group.

 “It is a small miracle that we’re still online,” Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said.
Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic — like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks — like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year — have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second.
But the furious assault on Spamhaus has shattered the charts, clocking in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.
“It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can’t keep up,” CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.
Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said that was no understatement.
“This attack is the largest that has been publicly disclosed — ever — in the history of the Internet,” he said.
It’s unclear who exactly was behind the attack, although a man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus’ blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.
He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like. Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.
“They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order,” Kamphuis said.
Gilmore and Prince said the attack’s perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet’s infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.
The trick, called “DNS reflection,” works a little bit like mailing requests for information to thousands of different organizations with a target’s return address written across the back of the envelopes. When all the organizations reply at once, they send a landslide of useless data to the unwitting addressee.
Both experts said the attack’s sheer size has sent ripples of disruptions across the Internet as servers moved mountains of junk traffic back and forth across the Web.
“At a minimum there would have been slowness,” Prince said, adding in a blog post that “if the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why.”
At the London Internet Exchange, where service providers exchange traffic across the globe, spokesman Malcolm Hutty said his organization had seen “a minor degree of congestion in a small portion of the network.”
But he said it was unlikely that any ordinary users had been affected by the attack.
Hanna said his site had so far managed to stay online, but warned that being knocked off the Internet could give spammers an opening to step up their mailings — which may mean more fake lottery announcements and pitches for penny stocks heading to people’s inboxes.
Hanna denied claims that his organization had behaved arbitrarily, noting that his group would lose its credibility if it started flagging benign content as spam.
“We have 1.7 billion people who watch over our shoulder,” he said. “If we start blocking emails that they want, they will obviously stop using us.”
Gilmore of Akamai was also dismissive of the claim that Spamhaus was biased.
“Spamhaus’ reputation is sterling,” he said.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.