First Mobile Phone Virus Nears 2nd Birthday

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting that the first mobile phone virus is almost 2 years old. F-Secure's chief research officer Mikko Hyppönen claims that although there are now over 200 mobile phone viruses the problem is unlikely to get as bad as it has with PCs. 'The difference is that PC viruses were first found in 1986 and mobile phone viruses were found in 2004... So we are living in the equivalent of 1988 but in 1988 Microsoft or hardware manufacturers were not doing anything about viruses ... In the mobile phone world, all the mobile phone manufacturers are working on the problem as are the phone operating system manufacturers, like Symbian, Microsoft and Palm. Operators are on top of this.'"

Comments

Re:PC != Windows.

[Hairball6494]

As far as I can tell, running a Personal Computer does not make you susceptible, running windows makes you susceptible. People running a decent O/S on their PC (OS X / openBSD / linux / etc) seem to be no more susceptible to viruses then phones are.

I'm sorry. I was under the impression that *NIX users weren't completely ignorant. The only people that have a problem with windows security are people that open email attachments without examining them, or people that still plug their machines into their cable modem (eg. my parents and girlfriend). I've been running "windows" since DOS 6.02 and windows 3.1 and i've managed to stay virus free. Funny how far a bit of education goes.

Also, you ever wonder why windows dominates the virus/exploit market for desktop software? Because windows dominates the market for desktop software. If I were going to write a virus, what OS would I write it for? 90% of the market? or 10%? really just a bit of logic. Also, would you care to explain to me how your beloved *nix servers dominated the server vulnerabilities in 2005? Oh. Again. perhaps because 85% of servers are *nix. Man those virus authors are smart!