Smartphone As Your Most Dangerous Possession

Hugh Pickens writes "CNN reports that now that smartphones double as wallets and bank accounts — allowing users to manage their finances, transfer money, make payments, deposit checks and swipe their phones as credit cards — smartphones have become very lucrative scores for thieves and with 30% of phone subscribers owning iPhones, BlackBerrys and Droids, there are a lot of people at risk. Storing a password and keeping your phone locked is a good start, but it's not going to protect you from professional fraudsters. 'Don't think that having an initial password set on your phone can stop people from getting in there,' says Nikki Junker, a victim advisor at the Identity Theft Resource Center. 'It's a very low level of protection — you can even find 30-second videos on how to crack smartphone passwords on YouTube.'"

i'm kind of a big deal

[FuckingNickName]

The late '90s were a zenith of Western society, a fair balance of regulation and freedom; technology and tradition.

Now the government's breathing down everyone's neck while they're neatly distracted by thinking they're such a big deal that they need to be contacted at every minute of the day or night.

Minimise your shitty gadgets. Do only what needs doing. Relax a little. If you think you need to bank from your 'phone, you're doing life wrong.

Re:And how many people actually protect their phon

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

android phones have numeric or alphanumeric passwords that can be enabled as of version 2.2

Re:Freakonomics

[mlts]

If I stuck a deadbolt cylinder on a hollow core door used for internal rooms, someone could easily kick it in without a moment's thought.

If I stuck a cylinder on a European lock that had multipoint locking, a solid jamb that uses steel rails that are sunk into the foundation, it would require a hydraulic ram to open it.

Similar with phones. If I stuck a PIN on an open device, there would be ways to get around it. However, if the device was built from the ground up with encrypted filesystems, keys in a secure RAM partition, and anti-brute force code where PIN guessing resulted in longer delays, and eventually a complete zeroization of the device, the same PIN that might be worthless on one device may adequately protect another.

One can see this when comparing a TrueCrypt keyfile stored on a cryptographic token (or an IronKey) compared to one stored on a generic USB flash drive. After try #20 with the USB flash drive, it doesn't matter, especially if one just copies the cyphertext to another image to protect against self destruct software. The same data stored on a hardware device using hardware encryption will be long gone before attempt #20 could even be made.

A 4 digit PIN can be excellent protection, or it can be a joke depending on how the device is architected.