Smartphone hacking is one of the fastest-growing issues in terms of cybersecurity, he said, especially with the advent of cloud storage. In Europe, and increasingly in the United States, hackers are able to bypass two-stage identification, whereby a text message is sent to one’s smartphone bearing a private code for entry into account websites. It is a problem that Vigna, computer science professor Christopher Kruegel and researchers from Northwestern University are getting ready to tackle with funding from a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation.