Palm Virii-Transferring On A Beam Near You?

byronne asks: "There is a completely uncharted virus distribution exploit available on Palm platforms that I've been wondering about for several months, namely, 'beaming.' By default, a Palm device's beam receive via infrared is set to on, or always ready to receive. If one were to write a piece of replicating code that ran in the OS as a hack, constantly 'beaming' copies of itself out the infrared port, you might have a significant problem at hand, especially if that code were malicious. Has anyone heard or read about this possibility?" It's possible, but the code needs to be executed. I'm not quite familiar enough with the Palm to know if this is possible once it's been "beamed."

"Picture this scenario: You're at a Comdex or other high tech tradeshow where practically every tek-head is carrying around their palm pilot. At intervals, a palm device infected with replicating code beams itself out. Nine times out of 10, it may not find a recipient, but when it does, that recipient becomes a carrier. This has nothing to do with e-mail, trojan horses or file infections; it would be the first true 'airborn' virus - similar to a biological virus. So now there are two carriers beaming around this trade show - obviously this has geometrically exponential possibilities of spreading, in theory. I haven't seen any coverage of this in the media at all, but it's my opinion that it's only a matter of time before we will need to address this. For example, Symantec developing an antivirus palm app is a step in the right direction, but it's probably pretty important to keep all infection methods in mind - not just e-mail."