By Winn Schwartau
Eugene Kaspersky is incredibly wrong on several of his
recent headline-grabbing
assertions. So help me, he is.
First, as reported on March 19th, 2010 by SC Magazine, he
said, “a move towards smart
phone devices will see computer security disappear along
with viruses and criminals.”
He added that, “1TB is more than what we need…3D [graphics]
is the end.”
Wow, how wrong can you be? The move to smart phones is
producing exactly the
opposite results: iPhones, iPads and other smart phones have
already been rooted,
Trojan’d and according to a July 2009 study, 3% of smart
phones are already infected
with some form of unwanted software. A global audience of a
few hundred million that
will expand to a couple of billion unsophisticated users is
a cybercriminal’s dream victim
demographic.
I asked Congress a number of years ago, “for what reason
would the bad guys NOT use
the Internet as a weapon?” They demurred and we see what has
happened.
Today, I see no rational argument that highly organized,
motivated and skilled
cybercriminal will choose to idly sit back and ignore the
most fertile hunting ground
imaginable; dumb users. Is there any evidence to the
contrary supporting Mr.
Kaspserky’s view? I submit not. Further I submit that his
short-sided views of future
RAM, CPU and bandwidth requirements are also in fundamental
error.
3D is the maximum imaginable requirement of the user? 1080p
is as far as we can go?
Absolutely not. Laboratories are playing with complete
sensory immersion, braincomputer
links, instantaneous squid-like feedback, and holodeck
simulations. A visit to
the MIT Media Lab or Santa Fe Institute clearly demonstrates
that there is no logical
upper limit of requisite computing resources for the
Enterprise or the Consumer.
My second disagreement is with Mr. Kaspersky’s April 28th
2010 statement at Infosec,
UK, that the currently heterogeneous population of competing
smart phone platforms is
predestined to collapse into a noncompetitive homogenous
blob. His only argument is
that open-source approaches such as with Android and Symbian
will last more than five
years, while iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, “closed
systems” are pre-ordained
for failure.
A little history. IBM dominated the first computing
monoculture (homogeneity) with the
mainframe. “You can’t get fired for buying IBM,” was a
topical C.Y.A. mantra that
survived long into Microsoft homogenized takeover of the
desktop environment.
The homogeneous monoculture of the mainframe era and the
last thirty years of
Windows was a byproduct of corporate entrenchment and the
simplicity of single vendor
integration, standardization and deployment, (albeit
questionable from a security
viewpoint).
The smart phone era has been unpredictably chaotic, in a
good way. The projected four
billion mobile endpoints (2013-4) are not being driven by a
controlled corporate culture.
Smart phone purchases are dictated by a whimsical and
capricious, transnational and
cross-cultural buying public who knows no allegiance. (Mac
and iPhone fans
notwithstanding.) Their obvious fickleness is exploited by
carriers who offer a dizzying
array of hardware platforms, multiple operating environments
and now, suites of
applications.
In this truly heterogeneous market, the user cares about
tweeting, texting, facebooking,
surfing, snapping megapixel pictures and sharing their
videos with others. In the Web
2.0+ world, the OS and the hardware are completely
incidental to the interoperability and
compatibility of functionality… not the underpinning
technology. Oh, and does it come
in pink?
So, Mr. Kaspersky, will the iPhone or iPad of 2015 project
holographic images of aging
baby boomers to their descendants? Maybe. But I would also
lay odds it would do so
with Apple tightly managing its kernel controlled
pre-emptive multi-tasking OS. Will
Android offer a competing open-source application? Yup. And
so will Symbian and
Microsoft and it will eat up gobs of computing resources and
bandwidth, too.
Fundamentally, sir, there is no end to innovation, no end to
computing power
requirements and no end to the demands of the
multi-immersive consumer.
And that brings up the third of Mr. Kaspersky’s triumvirate
of misstatements. In his
March 11th, 2010 interview with PC Pro, he claimed that
Apple is blocking third party
security software on the iPhone.
That claim is simply not true. Mobile Active Defense was
completely reviewed, vetted,
stapled, folded and ultimately approved by Apple for iPhone
and iPad security. The
complete Enterprise Compliance Edition is to soon follow.
All this prior to his interview.
Our job, I submit, is to invisibly protect two billions
users from themselves and the
hostiles while they enjoy the fruits of the technology that
they cannot nor should not be
expected to understand.
Winn Schwartau is considered among one of the leading experts on information security, infrastructure protection, electronic privacy. He is one of the world's top experts and renowned author and lecturer on security, privacy, infowar, cyber-terrorism and related topics. Honored in 2002 by Network World as a "Power Thinker" and one of the most powerful people by Network Wold. In 2008 voted one of the Top 25 Most Influential People by Security Magazine and again in 2009 one of the Top 5 Security Thinkers.
More information at www.mobileactivedefense.com