Smartphones the weak spot in hacker fight: Deutsche Telekom

BERLIN -- Smartphones and tablet devices are the new weak spot in the battle against cyber-criminals, according to the head of computer security at Europe’s biggest phone company.

Businesses and governments have already been struggling with a record number of so-called distributed denial of service attacks, which have brought down websites from Sony Corp’s PlayStation Network to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal page. Now the ubiquity of powerful smartphones with fast Internet connections, and weak security, is making it even easier for hackers to launch large-scale assaults on online services, said Mr Thomas Tschersich, Deutsche Telekom AG’s computer security chief.

Mobile devices “are the perfect target for attackers,” he said in an interview.

To conduct denial of service attacks, hackers typically infect computers with malware and control these so-called “bots” to send an overwhelming amount of traffic to the servers or networks they want to shut down. The relative ease of infecting mobile devices -- and the fact that their connection speeds are often faster than home broadband -- is giving criminals the platform to send even greater amounts of data to crash websites, Mr Tschersich said.

Deutsche Telekom notifies about 20,000 customers in Germany every month that their devices have been turned into bots and asks them to remove malware, Mr Tschersich said. Its networks register attacks of at least several gigabytes every hour.

Deutsche Telekom can detect suspicious incoming traffic by sampling data, but it needs an explicit agreement with customers to do so, Mr Tschersich said. Rules to let carriers scan traffic across the board would help tackle the problem, he added.

Denial of service attacks typically cost criminals several hundred euros to arrange and often include a money-back guarantee in case of failure, making them an affordable and anonymous means of blackmail, Mr Tschersich said. Targets frequently pay up to get their shops or portals back up, as the amounts paid are dwarfed by potential losses of revenue.

BLOOMBERG