Mobile

When it comes to mobile security, users are routinely warned to be extremely careful, avoid suspicious links, emails, and attachments. But the growth of no-click attacks sidesteps these soft defenses.

Google recently drilled into one such attack, which happened to have hit an iPhone. “We assess this to be one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we’ve ever seen, further demonstrating that the capabilities (one vendor) provides rival those previously thought to be accessible to only a handful of nation states,” said the Google advisory.

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It’s one of the sad facts of mobile authentication that the industry tends to initially support the least effective security options. Hence, phones initially supported authentication based on fingerprints (which can be impacted by prescriptions, cleaning products, hand injuries, and dozens of other factors) and then moved on to facial recognition. 

In theory, facial recognition is supposed to be more accurate. Mathematically, that’s fair, as it is examining far more data points than scanning a fingerprint. But the reality in the real world is much more problematic. It requires a precise distance from the phone and yet offers no pre-scan markers for the user to know when they hit it correctly. That’s one reason I see facial recognition reject a scan roughly 40% of the time — even though it will approve a positive scan two seconds later.

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