Lively commentary on that topic came during the RSA Conference here this week as Ed Amoroso, chief security officer at AT&T, Ian Robertson, RIM director security, and Alex Stamos, partner at security firm iSec, shared a discussion panel moderated by Lookout CEO John Hering. There was a candid willingness to acknowledge that the current world, where mobile devices are tightly bound to wireless telecom provider networks, may not be the best in terms of tackling security issues that are expected to accelerate over the years.

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"We're probably at the cusp of a threat that will change dramatically," said AT&T's Amoroso, who compared the current threat situation around mobile to the how the threat to PCs looked in 1988 before the onslaught of viruses and other attacks that followed.

As adoption of and tablets accelerates, the expectation is they will become a very attractive target. "We've not seen much in terms of direct attacks on mobile phones," said RIM's Robertson. But these devices are being loaded up with personal data that "from an aggressor's viewpoint," makes them "an attractive target," though the infection record today largely relies on "duping users" to open malware, for example.

Amoroso said few people realize how vulnerable the GSM wireless infrastructure is. The GSM standard included a decision "not to authenticate to the tower," said Amoroso, and although the next-generation LTE service addresses that, it remains a standards problem that needs to be fixed, especially as carriers run multiple wireless networks. "The audit community is in a total snooze fest on this topic," he said.