On Tuesday, security behemoth Symantec Corp. announced plans to acquire Nukona, Inc., a privately-held provider of mobile application management.

According to Symantec, the acquisition extends Symantec’s enterprise mobility portfolio to include a cross-platform mobile application protection solution to help IT organizations “protect and isolate corporate data and applications across both corporate owned and personally owned devices.”

Between Nukona and the recently acquired Odyssey Software, Symantec is on track to bring its protection software deep into mobile territory.

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On Friday, Juniper Research published its latest report projecting that NFC will drive mCommerce to new heights during the next 36 months.

Juniper forecasts that NFC will facilitate $74 billion in transactions annually by 2015. This reality will manifest, says Juniper, as NFC becomes increasingly more relied upon by consumers.

However, as Juniper takes great care to emphasize, “The Mobile Commerce Markets report shows that the rapid adoption of mobile devices for commerce-related applications is by no means limited to NFC.”

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Forget terrorists, it’s the hackers who will soon pose the greatest threat to U.S. security. That’s according to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The AP reported Friday that this was the message from the FBI boss during a speech to a group of cybersecurity experts on Thursday.

The dangers posed by organized cyber-crime, rogue hacktivists and computer breaches backed by foreign governments have become a focus for the FBI.

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Got a small pile of unwanted electronics that have been replaced by new models and gadgets in your life?

If you opt to get rid of them, you could be making one or more cybercriminals very happy.

Although the average mobile user retains their newest phone for at least twelve months, 90% of the phones sold in the last 25 years are still in circulation, if not in service.

This reality means that when secondhand devices fall into the wrong hands, sensitive information that you thought was erased can be restored and used against you.

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No matter how much of a devoted smartphone user you may be, don’t throw away your wallet and traditional forms of payment just yet.

A new survey conducted by Radius Global Market Research shows that the majority of Americans “remain quite skeptical” of smartphone generated payment solutions.

What does that mean? At least in the near term, traditional forms of payment won’t be abandoned.

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According to an eye-opening new report from the Wall Street Journal, Google used special code as a means to work around user privacy settings established by millions of iPhone owners and desktop users running Safari.

The Wall Street Journal revealed that Google used code that “tricks” Safari into letting the search giant monitor user behaviors. This code essentially circumvents Safari’s default security settings which restrict such tracking.

The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser.

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As Mobile Marketing Watch reported Tuesday, word recently surfaced that Google’s mobile wallet commerce platform is vulnerable to potential criminal attacks from hackers who have figured out how to gain access to the Google prepaid card already linked to a user’s smartphone. The discovery was of such grave and immediate concern that over the weekend a Google representative “strongly encouraged” anyone who “loses or wants to sell their phone to first call Google Wallet support to disable the prepaid card.”

On Monday, Google temporarily disabled provisioning of prepaid cards. “We took this step,” Google said, “as a precaution until we issue a permanent fix soon.“

Well, this morning, Google fans awakened to the news that the Internet search giant has restored prepaid card provisioning capabilities to the mobile payments platform. How come? Google says it has successfully addressed the underlying vulnerability and hack attacks can now be successfully averted.

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