By Bill Cunningham
Appy Christmas!
For our smart phones we can download apps to make our busy lives somehow better. We have about 8 million to choose from! And are all of them safe to use, and as good as claimed, with as many users as claimed? Well of course not! It’s another way that the baddies can reach us to fleece us. While many app stores have vetting and review processes, malicious and insecure apps continue to make it onto some stores. Some apps have achieved their ratings by paying “review brokers” to write reviews as if they were genuine users of the software. Some apps can introduce malicious software to our phones to collect our sensitive infor-mation. Earlier this year Which? stated “many apps use weak data encryption, have poor password policies and basic vulnerabilities”. The National Crime Se-curity Centre last year stated its concerns about how to protect us mobile phone users from malicious apps, resulting now in a voluntary code of practice for app store operators and app developers to pro-tect our security and privacy. Note the word voluntary. So we still have to be aware of rogue developers and sellers and take the following actions. Looking out for highly rated apps with positive user experiences is a start before we download anything. If we choose to top up our pre-loaded apps via an unofficial/uncertified store for the product, then we take the risk of installing software created or mod-ified by a criminal. Scrutinise carefully what permissions are sought in the install, particularly if it’s requesting access to our phonebook and camera. Just as for our computer, having anti-virus software on our phone is important. If the app is dat-ed/hasn’t been changed for a year or so, then it may be more susceptible to securi-ty breaches. Official stores have recom-mended apps, and they should have been scrutinised for safety. Even so it’s not a given that these stores will have 100% clean apps. Checking and double check-ing is a pain of course, but the conse-quences of having dodgy software on our phone can lead to far more pain. And we want a Happy Christmas; don’t we!