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Mobile Phones Put Virus Threat On Hold
David Utter
Staff Writer
2005-06-22
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Several factors have to come into play before the breathless hype of antivirus vendors matches the reality.
Maybe having a smartphone with Windows Mobile 5.0 on it won't be so smart after all.
But according to a Gartner report, it will take until 2007 until a perfect storm of large scale smartphone adoption, frequent exchange of executable files, and dominance of one operating system in the smartphone space happens.
Anyone remotely connected to supporting Windows technology in an enterprise setting will understand the potential problem here.
Imagine a future where an enterprise full of mobile users, all equipped with smartphones hosting Windows Mobile, suddenly start experiencing the equivalent of a Slammer attack.
John Pescatore, vice president and research fellow with Gartner, spent thirteen years with GTE. He says hackers "were like termites in the system even then, and those were 'dumb' phones."
Mr. Pescatore and his co-author of a recent report on mobile virus vulnerabilities don't see a huge need for antivirus software on smartphone yet, not until the end of 2007. Greater interoperability between devices, the kind that a single operating system would enable, will have to happen first.
And they don't consider device-based protection a wise investment. "Smart phone or PDA anti-virus approaches that rely on device software will always fail to block the most damaging viruses," they wrote.
Instead, successful widespread attacks will happen at the network level, unless mobile carriers do their part to block potential threats like worms or viruses before they could spread to the client devices.
"By the end of 2006, all wireless service providers should be required to offer over-the-air mobile malware protection," they said. Of course, that leaves the actual over-the-air provisioning of services as a possible point of vulnerability.
Wireless carriers provision services as customers request them. By doing that over-the-air, a user doesn't have to bring the client device to a store or other support center to have a service added or removed.
But if a malicious attacker could get access deeply enough into a wireless provider, they could use provisioning to distribute malware to clients. Perhaps that potential is enough to merit client-side antivirus and anti-spyware products.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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