Two mobile security experts say that smartphone exploits are coming, as cybercriminals start to figure out how to make money by hacking mobile devices. But I think they're a bit off track.

Tim Armstrong, a malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based cyber security vendor, says security vendors have seen a huge increase in mobile attacks since late last year. Kaspersky Lab identified more than 1,550 mobile malware signatures in September, reports "InfoWorld" (http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/mobile-malware-exploits-the-way-expe...).

Right now, Nokia's Symbian operating system, popular outside the United States, is the major target for mobile exploits, but Apple's iPhone and Android phones are likely to be growing targets, Jarno Niemela, a senior researcher with F-Secure, a Helsinki-based security vendor, told "InfoWorld."

In many cases, early attempts at smartphone exploits have lacked complexity, Niemela said. But both Niemela and Armstrong predicted that smartphone exploits will become more sophisticated and more common. Niemela and Armstrong provided several examples of already-attempted exploits during a talk on mobile malware. All of their examples involved the Android.

So when they say "Mobile malware exploits," do they really mean Android, Symbian, and Windows 7 Mobile devices? Sounds an awful lot like the stories we've had for years where security experts talked of "Internet viruses," when they really meant Windows viruses.

-- Dennis Sellers