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The opening up of the mobile industry is great news for application developers but not so good for IT security professionals who want to sleep at night, executives from the security industry said last week.

Mobile phone operating systems have been highly fragmented and carriers have tightly controlled the applications that can easily be used on phones, but that approach is giving way to open-software platforms and easy-to-use application stores.

In addition to Apple's recently introduced iPhone SDK (software development kit), Google's open-source Android platform is due on phones soon and an open-source version of Symbian is on the way.

"Everyone has now decided that the developers are very important for the future of this business. If a developer can load software on a device, a hacker can load software on a device," said Mark Kominsky, CEO of Bluefire Security Technologies, during a panel discussion at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show in San Francisco. "I think we're probably 12 to 18 months away from something big happening," he added.

Mobile devices are beginning to have high bandwidth, open platforms and the ability to load new software, Kominsky said. "Those are the critical elements that occurred in the notebook when viruses took off about 20 years ago," he said.

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