Google chairman Eric Schmidt drew big laughs at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo this week but it most likely wasn’t on purpose. ZDNet reports that Schmidt told attendees are Gartner’s big IT conference that Android is “more secure than the iPhone,” which prompted laughter from the crowd. ZDNet also reports that Schmidt speculated that “in the distant future there would be an assumption that nothing is secure and that security will be devised on a per app basis for each user,” which probably wasn’t much comfort to the IT professionals in the audience.
While concerns about Android’s security are often overblown, it is true that the platform has become a magnet for hackers who want to seed their malware across users’ mobile devices. A study released by security firm F-Secure this year found that 79% of all mobile malware discovered targeted Android devices while McAfee said that it discovered more than 14,000 Android-related threats in the first quarter of 2013 alone. What’s more, mobile security vendor NQ estimates that Android malware infections tripled between 2011 and 2012, growing to a whopping 32.8 million devices last year.
A video of Schmidt follows below, although the audio doesn’t pick up on the laughter that ZDNet and other publications reported.
