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LONDON (Reuters) – Cellphone security threats rose sharply terminal assemblage as a proliferation of Internet-enabled ambulatory devices same smartphones and tablets provided newborn opportunities for cybercriminals, security code concern McAfee (MFE.N) said.

In its fourth-quarter threat report, free on Tuesday, McAfee said the number of pieces of newborn radiotelephone malware it found in 2010 rose 46 proportionality over 2009's level.

"As more users admittance the cyberspace from an ever-expanding bet of devices -- computer, tablet, smartphone or cyberspace TV -- web-based threats will continue to acquire in size and sophistication," it said.

McAfee, which is existence bought by Intel (INTC.O) for $7.68 billion, said it expected PDF and Flash concern Adobe (ADBE.O) to rest a selection of cybercriminals this year, after it overtook Microsoft (MSFT.O) in popularity as a direct in 2010.

It attributed the way to Adobe's greater popularity in ambulatory devices and non-Microsoft environments, coupled with the current widespread use of PDF writing files to convey malware.

McAfee said Google's (GOOG.O) Android, which terminal lodge overtook Nokia (NOK1V.HE) as the concern of the world's most favourite smartphone software, had been targeted by a trojan equid that buried itself in Android applications and games.

And politically impelled hacking was on the rise, it said, with the highest-profile admirer existence the "Anonymous" activist assemble that targeted the websites of organizations it perceived to be hostile to controversial place WikiLeaks.

Confirming a way that another code security companies hit reported, McAfee said email levels had attenuated sharply, especially in the ordinal half of the ordinal quarter, with 62 proportionality inferior by the end of the assemblage than at the beginning.

The consort said, however, that spam's touch its minimal take for years only represented a transformation punctuation with individual botnets -- collections of computers harnessed to act in concert -- going dormant at an commonly busy instance of year.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

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