IBM study shows significant rise in mobile security incidents

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The security landscape continues to shift as more people continue adopting mobile devices like tablets and smartphones at a fast rate.

IBM recently released its X-Force 2011 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report and revealed that since the beginning of the year, the company has monitored and analyzed an average of 12 billion security events on a daily basis.

The "bring your own device" approach has alarmed many companies because their corporate data is more exposed than ever.

"X-Force is projecting that the year 2011 will see twice the number of mobile exploit releases that occurred in 2010," said IBM. "X-Force has observed that many mobile phone vendors do not rapidly push out security updates for their devices."

With the rapid adoption of smartphones in particular, mobile security continues to be a key issue for users and companies. According to a recent study by Damballa Labs, the Android operating system, which is currently the No. 1 OS in the world, experienced a dramatic rise in security incidents. During one two-week period, 20,000 smartphones were compromised.