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First Mobile Phone Virus Nears 2nd Birthday

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the buy-him-some-cake dept.

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.'"

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. My N70 had norton by vasanth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I was surprised to see that my nokia N70 came with Norton anti virus for mobile phones installed.. And expected it was hogging my phone resource making the menus sluggish and got rid of the crap...

    I don't think mobile phone virus threat is much due to the varieties in platform the phones run.. Its just another way for anti virus companies to make money

  2. FUD by edxwelch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the origonal story, which stated that smartphones were unsecure, is total fud. A confirmation dialog box comes up on you screen when some one tries to connect via Bluetooth (and most people have bluetooth switched off anyways, becuase it consumes power), so really this virus would never have a chance to spread in real life and only seems to serve the purpose as a scare story

  3. Easy way to prevent viruses by Alicat1194 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Keep Bluetooth switched off unless you're specifically using it. No avenue of transmission = no virus.

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    You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
  4. Ground control to Major Tom by packetmon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

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    Infiltrated dot Net