The iPhone saga continues today with security concerns and news from Wall Street.
The New York Times reported yesterday that a team of security professionals working for Independent Security Evaluators successfully hacked into the iPhone through a WiFi connection. This news, along with the iPhone’s anemic sales figures (AT&T has activated 146,000 iPhones, just a little more than a quarter of Wall Street’s initial sales estimates), pushed down shares of both Apple and AT&T in early trading despite better-than-expected first-quarter results for AT&T.
Business Week’s Tech Beat is one blog among many to comment on the hack, saying “this incident is a clear sign that the cat and mouse game between security experts and hackers that has long been a part of life in the world of personal computers is going to become commonplace in phones too.”
However, IT Week presents many hackers as “working to help iPhone owners free themselves from the constraints of the self imposed restrictions of the device.” In this view, hackers act as nerd freedom fighters to “enable the iPhone to run popular applications, such as Skype, that haven’t been approved by Apple” and “to free the iPhone from the constraints of forcing owners to being locked to a single carrier.”
While the different takes on the news illustrate different views of the future of the American mobile phone market (see our post on Google’s bid for a slice of the airwaves for more on the “locked” v. “open access” debate), the take-home lesson for the moment is that innovation requires vigilance. As mobile devices proliferate and become more complex, IT departments will face new security threats.
For the time being, the team at ISE recommends, “users only visit sites they trust, not open Web sites from e-mails and not use unfamiliar Wi-Fi hotspots.” The conclusion: as we wait to see how the future will unfold, stay off your friend’s neighbor’s strangely titled WiFi, whether on a laptop or a web-equipped phone.
