Is your information safe?

Many are enchanted by fancy applications on smart phones but unaware of the potential risks posed by them.

Analysts said that various phone applications adored by smart phone users have become a new target for hackers to steal personal information.

Smart phone users account for 35 percent of mobile phone users in China’s urban areas, according to a survey issued by Google at the end of last year.

Google Inc, the world’s most used search engine, slashed 22 Android applications found to have fraud codes last December in an effort to protect its users from information leakage.

Information security has come to the spotlight among people who are hailing the fingerprint identification system in banking services wherein a single press of the thumb alleviates fears of information leakage.

The fingerprint identification system is among the many information technologies incubated by the booming information security industry, which is expected to generate 67 billion yuan ($10.5 billion) in revenue by 2015, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The industry has come to hold an ever larger portion of the country's market for information technology, said Chen Xinhe, director of the Department of Software Industry of the ministry's Electronic Technology Information Research Institute.

Chen said the information security industry grew by more than 30 percent per year on average during the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10), gaining 18.2 billion yuan in revenue in 2010.

Yet, a report released in March by the China Software Testing Center did not express great confidence in the security of personal information kept by 105 popular websites, including the e-commerce websites Taobao, Amazon.com.cn and the Chinese search engine Baidu Inc.

China is now home to 512 million Internet users, more than the United States, of whom 60 percent have seen their online data stolen.