Are Mobile Phone Viruses a real threat?
Mobile phone use is so wide spread that even in Developing Nations persons
like tea boys ,Rickshaw pullers,Road side vendors,domestic servants can use the same now.In fact the famous and the rich ask there secretary to carry the mobile for them and give them only important calls.In India the mobile advertisement invariably show the use of their product by common man.
The first of its kind a virus called Cabir has been reported in June 2004 by the French arm of Kaspersky Labs, aRussian security software developer It spreads via Bluetooth.The developers of Cabir apparently have not designed the virus to propagate ona massive scale,but to demonstrate that cells phone and PDAs can be infected by malicious code.Another kind of virus is called a Mosquito Trojan it is malicious because it fires off text
messages without the user consent while the unlicensed game is being played,found in August 2004,One more very famous virus CommWarrior targets mobile phones that use the Symbian Series 60 operating system, and spreads either over Bluetooth or as an MMS ,sends random MMS to other numbers.Other
viruses like Metal Gear Solid disable the anti-virus files in the mobile.Mabir ,Fontal.Drever and Dampign damage the data stored on the mobile.These viruses are spread through Bluetooth .infrared .WiFi and other networking services where the mobile phones are in constant touch with their satellite.I always keep my networking services off and don’t download from an unknown site,I also prefer to use phones which have Anti virus protection, says internet guru Vijay Mukhi.Many networks are also offering always –on network connections to customers that ensure they get their e –mail and text messages as fast as possible along with other free downloads from the net.
From the above we can observe that useage of mobiles are matching internet and as such a vast mobile network is formed resulting in perhaps mobile virus.