Malicious attacks in Mobile Device Clouds: A data driven risk assessment

Mobile Device Clouds are becoming a reality with the quantitative and qualitative upgrades on mobile devices such as smart-phones and tablets. This proliferation renders mobile devices capable of initiating sophisticated cyberattacks especially when they coordinate together and form a distributed mobile botnets which we call “MobiBots”. MobiBots infect a large number of mobile devices and schedule targeted attacks by leveraging device-to-device (d2d) short range wireless communications. In this work, we first introduce MobiBots, the formation of MobiBots, their challenges, and limitations. We then make the case for MobiBots utilization. We show the potential for and impact of the large scale infection and coordination of mobile devices via short range wireless technologies in attacks against other mobile devices that come within proximity. We show that MobiBots are difficult to detect and isolate compared to common botnets. However, prevention techniques cost at least 40% of the network capacity.