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

Disagree all you like, doesn't make it true

[DrSkwid]

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_1169.htm

Stoned

Type
        Virus
SubType
        Boot
Discovery Date
        02/01/1988

Was at F-Secure event today

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those Mobile Viruses are on Symbian based OS and the S60 series phones seem to be the worst ones.

Ground control to Major Tom

[packetmon]

Just because there aren't as many at this time doesn't mean it isn't likely to become a big issue in the future. What I perceive happening at some point is a rogue group creating viruses to steal contacts then selling those contacts. Imagine the market for say Pamela Anderson's phone list... Imagine one for say the phone list of the President. While doing network studies (CCDP) I thought about the dangers of a multicast worm/virus. It would work spoofing corrupt images say to MSN messenger or Yahoo messenger or any other IM client which is streaming ads... Once streamed an infected image would take over a victim machine... While the concept is theoretical it isn't that far fetched...

Re:Easy way to prevent viruses

[sparr0w]

that'll work for BT transmitted viruses... but more and more cellphones are starting to use internet-esque transmissions methods over broadband cellular networks.... I equate BT transmitted viruses to floppy boot-sector viruses you'd be warned about in school. When was the last time you infected your Windows box by putting a rouge floppy in? How about from the Internet?

I think we need to take a more serious look at this problem. In the 70's and 80's, people laughed off the possibility of threats like these. Now, we spend millions of dollars trying to keep control over these growing problems. Hopefully we can take what we've learned with past threats and how they've evolved to help stop the flow across this new frontier... or at least slow them down. However, since many of these "smart" phones are already running versions of Windows, are we already doomed...?

1986?

[XO]

I know Mac and Amiga had tons of viruses before 1986, and I'd be willing to bet PC's did, too.. just that PC's weren't quite so much for game use, so there wasn't nearly as much pirating going around then...