Over a billion people use the PC platform to interact with the internet and yet security breaches are still an issue for the apparently ‘mature’ technology.

What security risks do we face becoming as reliant as we are on mobile technology?

According to mobile marketing experts Mobi Thinking, there are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers, that’s 77 percent of the world’s population. As mobile phone applications are further developed and used across multiple forms of commerce, criminals will continue to enter this space.

Businesses need a layered approach to online security for both pc and mobile-based activities. One company in the mobile behaviour space is Silver Tail Systems who are providing notable value in three main areas for businesses using the internet; brand and shareholder protection, IT Security and internet transactional fraud. The Merchant Risk Council (MRC) recently honored Silver Tail Systems, Inc. as the winner of the first Emerging Technology Awards (METAwards).

The MRC works with e-Commerce and multi-channel merchants, payment processors, credit card issuers, credit card brands, alternative payment providers, risk management leaders, and a variety of law enforcement agencies to improve the online shopping channel.

Silver Tail Systems addresses security requirements of e-commerce sites through behavioral analysis, proactively identifying suspicious behaviour. Their system saves a considerable amount of time and resources typically spent on analysis and clean up. The system detects malicious behaviour in real-time and sends notifications, removing the previous reliance on customers to report problems. This immediate response allows business owners to change business logic flows for criminals without impacting legitimate users or requiring engineering resources. In their press release EMEA commercial director Andy Chandler explained, “Our unique system creates models of what is normal traffic for a website’s population and uses that to identify threats,” he went on to say “we appeal to Banks, Insurance, ecommerce, Security ”.

Only a couple of months ago Fortinet reported the first variants of Zeus for Blackberry. Zeus, also known as Zbot, PRG, Wsnpoem, Gorhax and Kneber, is a Trojan horse that steals banking information by keystroke logging. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes.

Baroness Nevill-Jones, Head of CyberCrime for the UK Government, speaking to the BBC in February, stressed that a large part of the problem is that many companies don’t like to admit that they have been victims of cyber crime. If firms are too embarrassed to report all security breaches, it’s harder to raise awareness, and thus harder to stamp out problems. The fear of ‘reputational damage’ means estimates of the cost of cyber crime are inaccurate. The ‘worst case scenario’ according to Baroness Neville-Jones is likely to be a lot higher than £27bn.