Handheld computers are increasingly vulnerable to hacker attacks and should not be trusted to store "any critical or confidential information," security experts warned Thursday. Peiter Zatko, chief scientist and a vice president of @Stake, a Cambridge, Mass.-based security-engineering firm, and Joe . . .
Handheld computers are increasingly vulnerable to hacker attacks and should not be trusted to store "any critical or confidential information," security experts warned Thursday. Peiter Zatko, chief scientist and a vice president of @Stake, a Cambridge, Mass.-based security-engineering firm, and Joe Grand, an @Stake research scientist, noted that the growing business use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) raises concerns about security.

Security firms have been making similar warnings for some time.

"PDAs were designed for personal use but are now being used more for business," Zatko told a computer security conference here. "There's a security boundary that's being crossed."

Zatko and Grand asserted that data in handhelds can be easily compromised, notably through password retrieval, and that the devices themselves could be hijacked to spread viruses after being synchronized over networks.

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