"When you send a defective PDA to the manufacturer for tech support, they usually give you a new one and then resell the old one," said John Girard, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc. "Buying dead machines is an ideal method of pursuing identity theft."
What's more, 90% of mobile devices lack the protection necessary to ward off hackers, according to a recent strategic planning assumption conducted by Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner.
"Most devices have IrDA, Bluetooth and wireless connections, and many of them aren't set up properly. You can just walk around with a connected device of your own and see what you can find," Girard said.
Even if there are security settings activated by default on a device, users will often turn them off if they find them unintuitive to use, he said. "Security needs to be as transparent as possible to users," Girard said.
Malicious Code
While security researchers have developed "proof of concept" viruses for handheld devices and smart phones, nothing has been seen yet "in the wild," said David Perry, global director of education at antivirus developer Trend Micro Inc. in Cupertino, Calif. "E-mail is easier. It's universal, and PDAs aren't."
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