For a long time now we have been living with a computer in almost every home. It is just one of those things that everyone has, much like a television or microwave. But slowly we are moving away from computers and we are heading towards a new dynamic.

We are now living in a world where everyone has a phone that acts just like a computer and a lot of people are fulfilling their computing needs on those types of phones more than they are on their PC. This is something that is not going to change anytime soon either – we are going to see people move more and more to using their phones (or tablets) as their main device. If they are going to do that then they need to make sure they treat the phone just like they do their computer. If they do not then they will find out that their phones are going to be a playground where black hat hackers are going to run wild.

A lot of the noise that you hear these days when it comes to securing your phone from the bad guys has to do with people saying that Android phones are not effective (out of the box) when it comes to security.

That makes sense in some ways because the Android operating system is open source and the bad guys have easier access to the code base. But you should not feel comfortable if you are on the IPhone either because even with an Apple device the bad guys will be coming after you too.

The IPhone is one of the most popular smartphones on the market right now. That makes it a big target when it comes to the black hat hackers that are out there. The demographic appeal makes the IPhone potentially dangerous because it has been reported many times that the people who use IPhones have more money than the people who use other types of smartphones on the market. That is enough incentive for the bad guys to go after the people who own Apple devices and it is worth the extra hassle of having to reverse engineer the operating system of the IPhone to be able to hack them. That way they will be able to go after targets that have more money.

While the Android operating system may have more attacks against it, the IPhone has it’s fair share too.

Another fallacy that people have when it comes to the security of smartphones is that you always have to worry about apps when it comes to black hat hackers. You will hear that you need to be careful when it comes to the app stores that you download from. And that is true – you need to be wary of unofficial third party sites – but the biggest entrance when it comes to hacks is not the app stores; it is the browser that connects to the internet that is on your phone.

Just like the browser is able to introduce the bad guys to your home computer, it is also able to introduce the bad guys to your phone as well. That is why you need to make sure that when you are browsing the web on your phone you apply the same rules that you do when you are on the computer (be careful which sites you visit, never click on suspicious links in emails, install security software, etc). If you do not then the bad guys will be able to attack you the same way.

Naturally, this is an issue to personal users who have banking and other important data on their phones and they need to do everything they can to protect that. For business the need to safeguard smartphones is of even more importance given how much corporate data they can hold plus all the complexities posed by any BYOD scheme you may have chosen to implement.

So just remember that when you are own a smartphone you really have to worry about the security of it. It does not matter whether it is an IPhone or an Android device – the security of these phones is always going to pose a problem.