|
Viruses and hacking on mobile phones are still rare
but attacks are a looming danger as increasing numbers of people
access the Internet and download files with their handsets, experts
say.
A survey released this week at
the industry's Mobile World Congress showed that only 2.1 percent of
people had been struck by a virus themselves and only 11.6 percent
knew someone who had been affected by one.
The poll by IT security
specialist McAfee, based on 2,000 people in Britain, the United
States and Japan, showed that 86.3 percent had had no experience of
mobile phone viruses.
The survey did suggest however
that the more developed the mobile market is, with high use of the
Internet and downloads, the more likely people were to be hit by
bugs.
Virus attacks in Japan, the most
developed mobile phone market in the world, were far more
commonplace than elsewhere.
"We should look at places
like Japan which is where the future of mobile technology is,"
said Graham Cluley, a consultant at Sophos, another IT security
firm.
"I wouldn't be surprised if
we saw this problem growing because the phone is going to grow into
a sort of mobile computer."
The website www.mobilephoneviruses.com,
which tracks incidents of mobile virus infections, lists a handful
of examples such as Skulls, Velasco and Commwarrior.
The latter infected about 110,000
phones in Spain last year, attacking phones running Nokia's Symbian
operating system. It spread via MMS messages, text messages
containing an audio, video or picture file.
"Viruses aren't a huge issue
now but they have the potential to be so in the future when Internet
use is more widespread," said a telecom analyst at the
Forrester market research company, Pete Nuthall.
The industry is keen for phone
owners to use their handsets for more than just calls and texting --
for which profits are declining in developed countries -- with
Internet and video, games and mapping the basis of new product
offerings.
"It's a risk that we should
be aware of but one shouldn't make it dramatic and worry
people," said Emmanuel Forgues from Russian IT security group
Kaspersky. "But it's a risk that exists and is certainly going
to develop."
"There are few viruses that
attack the operating system now. What people are looking at is how
to propogate viruses," Forgues added.
One use of a virus would be to
implant something in a user's address book for publicity or
fraudulent purposes, for example.
Cluley said there were about
350,000 viruses written to attack computers running Microsoft
Windows and about 200 known ones for mobile phone operating systems.
Computer viruses were now being
written by organised crime gangs to steal money and personal
information, while mobile phone viruses "have tended to be
written by kids to show off," he said.
A 12-year-old boy wrote a virus
for the new Apple iPhone which disables it, "turning it into a
brick," said Cluley, and a user had to go to the boy's Internet
site and download some software.
This crude bit of malware, which
could not spread from phone to phone, was said to be an upgrade for
the iPhone's operating system.
At French network operator
Orange, a spokesperson explained that "with the convergence of
the worlds of IT and telecoms the threat is going to get more and
more serious.
"What interest developers is
that their viruses spread as much as possible," but the company
added that telephones used a number of different operating systems
at the present time, make this difficult.
Nuthall predicts that "it'll
take one big public mobile phone virus attack to create alarm."
In the future, he expects the
network operators like Orange to provide protection to their
clients.
"You'll end up seeing
operators selling bundled services which include a McAfee solution,
for example," he said.
- AFP
|
