Joan Goodchild of CSO Online writes about the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks taking place in the mobile enviornment:

Social engineers have been using various dirty tricks to fool people for centuries. Social engineering, the art of gaining access to buildings, systems or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques, is as old as crime itself and has been used in many ways for decades.

For the past several years online, social engineers have been trying to fool unsuspecting users into clicking on malicious links and giving up sensitive information by pretending to be old friends or trusted authorities on email and social networks.

And now that mobile devices have taken over our lives, social engineering is an attack method of choice to gain access to a person’s smartphone or tablet.

Information security expert Lenny Zeltser, senior faculty member with SANS Institute and an incident handler at the Internet Storm Center, who also blogs on security topics, recently shared three examples of current cons being used by criminals to get inside your mobile device.