Mobile vulnerabilities top IBM report

Thousands of disclosures studied.

Mobile device vulnerabilities are at the forefront of cyber criminal trends, according to IBM.

The company's X-Force Trend and Risk Report released this week studied public vulnerability disclosures from more than 4000 clients last year and found many targeted mobile platforms.

“We're starting to see real attack activity,” co-author of the report Tom Cross said. “It's not nearly as prevalent as attacks against traditional workstations, but it's growing and it's a problem that people need to start taking seriously.”

The report examined malware related to mobile devices last year and in a majority of cases, infections were delivered to devices via legitimate mobile app stores.

“Most of these attacks really require social engineering to some degree,” Adaptive Mobile vice president Ciaran Bradley said. “There are a limited number of ways you can get malware onto your device.”

The report found cross-site scripting vulnerabilities were half as common now as they were four years ago, while the prevalence of exploit code had fallen by a third over the same period. It also found vendors were more diligent at patching software.