On Monday Goolgle came out with another acquisition, but not in the social media sphere this time. Google is acquiring the smartphone maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in cash. That’s a 64% premium over the stock price. That’s a lot of valuable minutes! See the article here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/15/google-motorola-mobility_n_926923.html A key part of their press release was “The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.” This greatly expands the patent portfolio of Google as well, Motorola Mobility holds approximately 14,600 granted patents and 6,700 pending patent applications.
The next step in the evolution of the social web really is on the mobile device. It seems as if every company that has a web application and website is now porting everything to the mobile device. With the apps for iOS, Andriod and WebOS, they availability is use apps covers just about everyone. With this purchase of Motorola Mobility, Google is setting up more vertical integration of the app development process. As they say, they will keep the Andriod platform open, and we should be able to count on that from Google. As Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google, said, “We expect that this combination will enable us to break new ground for the Android ecosystem. However, our vision for Android is unchanged and Google remains firmly committed to Android as an open platform and a vibrant open source community. We will continue to work with all of our valued Android partners to develop and distribute innovative Android-powered devices.”
As companies move into the mobile space, there a number of threats that they will probably never have seen before. Are they prepared for a different threat landscape that is not the traditional things like virus’, malware and worms? Make no mistake, these traditional threats are occurring in mobile, but the new ones will be just as great. A key part of the new risk model for mobile is the data being ported between the social web applications and your phone. The Motorola Mobility platform if going to more integrated with Google we can expect, but this may just open your data to hackers through a different platform that does not have a 20 year history of address security threats.
Some of the key threats to mobile we can expect include:
- Social network data theft, leveraging your mobile applications to steal data through poor coding techniques
- Trojans applications, pretending to be legitimate applications that can steal data
- Man in the middle attacks, using the mobile application to launch further attacks and stay disguised
- In-app theft, using installed apps to break into your connected bank accounts or PayPal accounts
We do not know what the future holds for the Motorola Mobility purchase by Google, but I think we can safely assume the Google stock price will rise!
Gary Bahadur
CEO KRAA Security
www.kraasecurity.com
