iPhone Apps Malware Is The Focus Of This Year’s Black Hat Conference

From Jan. 31 to Feb. 3. is being held in Arlington, Va., this year’s Black Hat conference which unites the best hackers around the world who are committed to pierce the systems in order to enable organizations to improve the safety of their devices. This year they are giving much importance to the iPhone and its AppStore and other platforms such as Andorid. Their focus: malware.

A simple app downloaded from the appstore, can collect significant amount of personal data. According to Nicolas Seriot, a Swiss expert, an app is able to store your email address, phone number, keyboard’s cache, WiFi connections and the most recent GPS positions. And, since there are around 10,000 new apps sent to Apple daily, the risk of malware is high.

Users can delete their phone number from iPhone Settings [and] reset the keyboard cache and Safari’s Web history, but there is little they can do to prevent their Address Book or their own e-mail address from being harvested by malware. Big companies may also consider Apple’s program for iPhone enterprise deployment, which lets administrators create configuration profiles enforcing restrictions such as disabling Safari or disabling the App Store.

Tomorrow, Nicolas Seriot will demo an iPhone app and steal all the information from that device. . We will keep you updated.