Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Tuesday, October 17, 2006
The ever increasing threat of mobile viruses
According to a report from Kaspersky Lab the risk is especially high for Windows CE (as used in MS Smartphone, Phone Edition and Windows Mobile) and Symbian OS (as used in Nokia Series 60 and UIQ), as a software developer has open access to many parts of the system. That there are not many Windows CE viruses today is likely because it's hardly used in phones (relatively speaking). Symbian OS (via Series 60) is much more prevalent, but is supposedly also a more protected application environment.
Like on the PC side I believe viruses for just destroying things will not dominate, but rather such that generate money for the virus creators/distributors. That completely drives the PC virus "industry" today.
That was the case with the Java ME virus Red Browser, that generated expensive SMS messages. Hence not even Java ME is safe from viruses, but to a higher degree than Windows CE and Symbian OS.
Even so, Red Browser (being a typical Trojan) relied on the user's gullibility to download the application in the first place, and then accept Red Browser's sending of messages.
Windows CE, Symbian wide open to attack
Like on the PC side I believe viruses for just destroying things will not dominate, but rather such that generate money for the virus creators/distributors. That completely drives the PC virus "industry" today.
That was the case with the Java ME virus Red Browser, that generated expensive SMS messages. Hence not even Java ME is safe from viruses, but to a higher degree than Windows CE and Symbian OS.
Even so, Red Browser (being a typical Trojan) relied on the user's gullibility to download the application in the first place, and then accept Red Browser's sending of messages.
Windows CE, Symbian wide open to attack
