I'm Robert Vamosi, Senior Editor CNET. Today I'm talking toyou about mobile viruses. We haven't heard a lot about mobile viruses, andthat's in part because mobile devices lack a dominant operating system. But, incertain parts of the world, one or two operating systems have moved ahead. One,the Symbian operating system, currently enjoys roughly 70% saturation in Europeand in Asia, and that's enough for hackers to start writing code for mobiledevices.
So how are they doing it? What are the vectors that they'reusing to attack mobile devices? One is pretty common and it's shared with thePC at home, and that is to download an infected file onto your mobile device.Another vector is direct, and by direct I mean sharing something with anotherdevice. We saw that in PCs by sharing floppy disks that were infected, and inthe mobile world you can share a memory card with photographs or songs withsomeone else and infect their system pretty easily.
Now you don't have to be in the physical same space assomeone else to infect them, and for a mobile device it can send out what'scalled an MMS signal, multimedia message signal, and we've already seen a viruscalled Com Warrior do this, where it's been able to infect mobile devicesworldwide just going after the address book found in each mobile device.
But the most pernicious way to infect a mobile device, Ithink, is BlueTooth. Here, you could be sitting at a sporting event and you sitdown next to somebody who has an infected mobile device and you need to go makea phone call and you see a message on your screen that it wants to accept acall from a phone that you've never heard of before. Yes/no. It keeps repeatingthe message over and over again. Antivirus vendors tell me that the number onereason people infect their own mobile device is that they need to make a phonecall, so they say yes and they accept the virus onto their system just so theyhave access to the outside world. In doing so, however, you have now become avector and you are now spreading the virus to other mobile devices around you.
So what's the solution? Well that depends on the vector. Forthe first three vectors that we discussed, download, direct and MMS, I wouldrecommend installing antivirus protection for your mobile device. ForBlueTooth, know that it has a limited range of 30 to 100 feet, so rather thanaccept an infected message from a cell phone that you don't know, I recommendthat you simply walk away.
