Category: Mobile Security

Innovation could change the way people use their mobile devices to shop

Continued innovation may power the growth of mobile commerce. The sector is still in a relatively nascent stage, which makes it prime for innovation. Retailers, in particular, may bring new things to the mobile commerce sector as they continually seek out better ways to engage consumers. Target has reportedly begun developing its own mobile payments service, which it intends to launch at some point next year. Retailers are not the only ones bringing new services to the mobile commerce space, of course, as social media companies have also begun doing so.

Pinterest is showing more support for mobile commerce

Pinterest has been working to better support mobile payments, making it possible for users to purchase Pins they are interested in. The social networking site is now notifying users when products they are interested in drop in price, making them more financially attractive. This has proven particularly popular during the holiday season, but Pinterest has had trouble promoting mobile commerce among its user base overall. Forrester Research suggested that the launch of the company’s mobile commerce initiative was “weak” due to the limited inventory that merchants have.

New technology is making mobile shopping more convenient and secure

Introducing new services and features to the mobile commerce sector has made consumers more interested in the concept of mobile shopping. Notably, consumers are quite interested in services that they consider to be convenient. Security is also a major issue for many consumers, which has lead to the introduction of new security technologies that are designed to improve the mobile payments space as a whole. Biometric technology, in particular, has become a powerful tool for keeping consumer information safe.

Companies are looking to improve their mobile commerce platforms

Many companies involved in the mobile commerce space have been testing new services in an effort to make mobile shopping easier and more attractive to consumers. As more innovation comes to the sector, services that already exist are likely to improve, offering consumers better options when it comes to shopping and purchasing products with their mobile devices.

A man has now been arrested by police in the United Kingdom in conjunction with the November 14 cyberattack.

Back on November 14, the server at Vtech was hacked in a massive cyberattack that placed the mobile security of an estimated 11.6 million customers at risk of having their personal information exposed.

Police in the U.K. who were investigating this data breach have now made an arrest in the case.

Vtech experienced its massive mobile security hack on November 14, when someone broke in and gained access to the email addresses, names, photos, birthdates and weakly encrypted passwords of that company’s customers. Essentially, any information that had been stored into the Learning Lodge app store database – which is used by many of the educational toys produced by Vtech – became accessible to the hacker through the cyberattack.

In November, Vtech had said that the mobile security breach impacted about 4.8 million of its customers.

However, earlier in December the company updated that number, increasing it by more than double, to 11.6 million. Among them, 6.4 million of those affected customers are children. That said, only a few days ago, police in the United Kingdom placed a 21 year old male under arrest under suspicion of having violated the Computer Misuse Act by way of two separate offenses. The first was the unauthorized use of a computer. The second was in using that computer to access data in an unauthorized way.

The police have also seized a number of electronic gadgets in order to conduct a forensic examination on the case. These devices were collected during the raid which occurred to the west of London in Bracknell. That part of the country is known for being an important part of the technology industry.

The arrest in this mobile security breach case was conducted by officers from the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit as a part of a larger effort in conjunction with other agencies that was focused on tracking down the hacker behind the VTech breach. The head of the Unit, Craig Jones, reported that the investigation remains early on and there is still a great deal more that can be learned about what happened.