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September 02, 2005
Anti-virus for mobile phones coming to high street
Finnish security firm F-Secure has created anti-virus software for mobile phones, that will be offered for sale on the High Street. The program was developed in response to the growing number of viruses infecting handsets.
Viruses that hop from phone to phone have been seen to spread at a Live8 concert and at the World Championships in Helsinki. The phone viruses are expected to become as big a security issue as Windows viruses.
According to Richard Hales, UK manager for F-Secure, although many mobile operators have installed software in their networks to stop the spread of viruses, better protection was required to stop the bugs passing from phone to phone.
Mobile viruses, including Cabir and Commwarrior, can spread via the Bluetooth short range radio system, which is found on many smart phones. Commwarrior can also spread via multimedia messaging systems. Most of the mobile phone viruses target handsets that use the Symbian operating system. It is possible to avoid infection by turning off Bluetooth on smart phones.
According to Ollie Whitehouse, technical manager at Symantec, there are some factors that limit the spread of mobile virues.
"None of them have been truly autonomous like worms on PCs," he said. "They always require a certain degree of user interaction."
However, he said that this limitation was likely to disappear as the numbers of ways to get data in and out of phones increased.
F-Secure’s anti-virus software for mobiles will be in the shops and available online from 5 September. It is designed for Nokia's Symbian-using smartphones.
Posted by at September 2, 2005 11:23 PM
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