The Internet has its own Red Light District, and it is one of the most unsafe areas you can browse. Online porn is a profitable sideline for the adult industry, but a mainline business for eastern European cyber mafias. More than 100 new porn sites are created every day, catering to every niche whim you can imagine. Online porn is highly profitable due to multiple streams of income generated from these sites. Just a few examples are monthly subscription fees, advertising, link pharming, and outright sales of visitor information. A very high percentage of porn sites are just teaser sites that function as a marketing funnel to sites that actually charge money.
Cybercrime takes it a step further. They use both newly created porn sites and hack existing ones to infect these website’s users with malware. Very often the victim has MS-office, Adobe or Flash versions that are older and have vulnerabilities that make infection of the PC a piece of cake for the bad guys. They are moving rapidly to mobile though. Generally, most mobile users do not use their Smartphone to watch porn, but the ones that do run a significantly higher risk to infect their phone with mobile malware. Recently, security vendor Blue Coat found that there is a visible change showing that pornography sites are moving from PCs to mobile: “It is important to note that mobile users are going to pornography sites less than one percent of the time. When they do visit pornography sites, though, they have a high risk of finding a threat.” (1)
There are now specific botnets that target mobile devices exclusively, and almost one-quarter of malware on mobile devices comes from porn websites. In other words, watching mobile porn on a Smartphone is a much higher risk than watching it on your PC. Reason? Smartphone operating systems, especially Android, are not as secure as a PC, there are many vulnerabilities that are unknown, and exploited by cybercrime.
Blue Coat also said that there is an additional problem with watching mobile porn. It’s hard to differentiate the sites; you cannot hover over URLs to see the actual destination where they go. Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist for Blue Coat said. "When you click a link on a mobile phone, it's harder to know what form of Russian roulette they're playing."
Traditionally, porn has been an early traffic driver for any new technology – VCR, Pay-per-view on TV, Internet and now Mobile. Cybercrime has been driving traffic to (potentially infected) porn sites using tactics like spam, phishing, uploading deceptive advertising to search engines and even outright poisoning of search engine results. Expect all these tactics to be utilized for mobile porn as well, so getting some security awareness training is a good idea.
Could malware on a mobile phone infect your PC? Some malware is multi-platform and recognizes what platform they are on, and what they get connected to. So if your Smartphone is infected and you synch with your PC, there is the risk that your PC gets infected as well with what you could call a “porn transfer”.
Mobile device security is still in its early years, and mobile app security is even rarer. There is a little bit of good news though, as Google just quietly made your Android phone more secure. They just deployed a universal app-scanning system that watches your device for any new app and instantly checks the app for malicious or harmful code, even apps you “sideload” onto the phone from outside the Google Play Store. The upshot though: it’s really very risky to watch mobile porn on any kind of Smartphone. Not recommended!
See the Blue Coat 2013 Mobile Malware Report here: http://www.bluecoat.com/sites/default/files/documents/files/BC_2013_Mobile_Malware_Report-v1d.pdf
