Mobile phishing, aka "mobphishing," doesn't involve e-mail and bogus Web pages as standard phishing attacks do; instead, mobphishing refers to fraudulent Wi-Fi access points coming from a smart mobile device as opposed to a laptop. In a presentation at the 2007 RSA Conference, Carl Banzhof, VP and chief technology evangelist at McAfee, said that he noticed newer mobile devices were including 802.11 support and wondered if one could hijack a user's hot spot connection (a so-called evil twin attack) using his own code. Banzhof purchased a T-Mobile MDA and, after a bit of trying, succeeded. The advantages of this new attack include being stealth (no one would suspect a smart phone would be capable of this), the ability to be mobile (he could carry it in his pocket, anywhere), the ability to get close to his victims (sitting literally next to them), and the ability to get into places that ordinarily would not allow laptops.
In an evil twin attack, the criminal overpowers a victim's connection to a public hot spot, convincing laptop users to connect to their much stronger device and thereby acting as a man-in-the-middle conduit to the Internet. Once someone is connected to the evil-twin access point, a criminal could then sniff data packets passing through their machine on the way to the Internet or simply steal login credentials and other personal data. Banzhof said in the future the mobile-access-point attacker might also be able to export his or her collection of stolen personal data via a legitimate access point connection or via EDGE technology. He also hinted that it might be even easier to accomplish this attack with Apple's new iPhone, which will be running a BSD Unix-based Mac operating system. There are many BSD tools that would be easy to port over. While Apple insists its phone will be a closed system (meaning one can't add software), Banzhof doubted that the iPhone operating system would really be closed.
