As devices get more sophisticated, so do the threats to mobile security. Unsolicited messages are already a major concern overseas, according to mobile email specialist Cloudmark's JF Sullivan.

In this detailed interview, Mr. Sullivan, who is vice president of marketing at Cloudmark, outlines some of the mobile security issues, risks and trends that he is seeing. Mobile Marketer's Mickey Alam Khan interviewed. Excerpts:

What is the dominate trend you are seeing in mobile security?
From Cloudmark's perspective, it's no surprise that spam is emerging in Europe as the dominant, and scary, trend in mobile security.

Most people are already aware that the Chinese and Japanese are contending with 40-50 percent of text messaging spam, but that trend appears to be emerging in Europe now as well.

Cloudmark recently conducted a survey with YouGov in the U.K. where 66 percent of mobile users reported receiving spam messages on their handsets and more than a third of these messages included a phishing link to a malicious Web site.

Like many other mobile trends, this portends bad things for mobility, particularly as mobile Internet access increases in North America.

Why is that the case?
There are a number of reasons why this is happening. One reason is that we hear mobile advertising is finally -- after about five years -- starting to take off in Europe. Certainly, many of our prospects are discussing this topic.

We are also witnessing the convergence of social networking with mobility, particularly in the applications that we see in Asia, as well as Europe and North America.

These social networking applications, such as Facebook, on iPhones and BlackBerries are introducing usage, but they are also introducing new avenues for the intrusion of spam.

Of course, we also are seeing an increase in email usage overall, as smarter, Web-ready handsets ease access to email.

So perhaps the aggregate reason is that there is an increase of communication vectors. Furthermore, these communication vectors, which include email, SMS and, now, social networking interactions, are all becoming accessible to mobile users and to the malicious people who target those users.

What types of security risks should marketers be aware of when dealing with mobile?
The security risks for mobile are not inherently different from email. Rather, the problem is that there are simply so many more avenues for messaging abuse, like phishing, bot intrusion, spam and fraud, to occur in the mobile marketplace.

In the past, the biggest security issue was controlling email or SMS text to the mobile user. However, today's applications are much more sophisticated and the interaction between the users is more ubiquitous.

Consider this: because the interaction is more frequent and numerous between users, the possibility of brand erosion, miscommunication and marketing ill will are more heightened than ever before.

What is Cloudmark doing in the mobile space?
Cloudmark was one of the first companies to respond to the impending mobile messaging threat, extending its messaging security solution to protect mobile networks from spam, phishing and virus attacks originating from Internet email and other mobile networks.

Cloudmark's threat classification system is language, format and network-protocol agnostic, so all types of mobile spam are identified and blocked before they are transmitted to subscribers.

The result is a single, comprehensive engine capable of protecting against all types of existing and future abuses and scalable enough to meet the demands of global wireless service providers.

Cloudmark Authority for Mobile Operators can be implemented by mobile operators at the email-to-mobile gateway, SMSC [Short Message Service Center] or MMSC [Multimedia Messaging Service Center] to provide complete protection against mobile spam, phishing and virus threats originating from the Internet or other mobile networks and devices.

Currently, Cloudmark solutions protect more than several hundred million mailboxes and the company works with more than 100 of the world's largest service providers and mobile operator networks, including 11 of the top 12 in North America.

What are marketers are doing to address mobile security? And what tips do you have for marketers on mobile security?
From our side, we see marketers spending more time on customer retention mobile marketing.

It's our understanding, for example, that John Lewis of London, a premier retail brand, spends more than 90 percent of its marketing budget on customer retention versus customer acquisition and a significant portion of that is centered around emerging technologies that connect their customers via communities including blogging, social networking and even podcasts.

The more marketers can strengthen their existing customer base, the more attractive they are to new customers.

As an interesting side anecdote, there was a qualitative study done by MarketingSherpa that clearly demonstrated that none of the problems marketers deal with in email marketing -- easily applied to mobile -- are ever because of customer retention. Conversely, all of the problems are introduced by actions that come from customer acquisition.