Any of you working in the Mobile Industry for the last 3-4 years may well have noticed an upsurge in the number of (usually uninformed) people talking about how viruses were coming to attack the world of Mobile. With the advent of Bluetooth, people were going to have their devices infected without knowing, and they (the innocent people) wouldn’t be able to function without their phone working! Oh woe!
Well it never really happened did it – at least not in the way it was predicted. A few people came up with about 3 different Series60 viruses, which did some damage, and then a load of script kiddies copied the files and made about 300 versions – but even having said that, most were based on the same simple code.
Other than that, there were not really tons of handsets getting nailed by viruses – even though the Mobile virus solution companies would have you believe there were! But why did the mobile threat never really materialise? Well here are some suggestions:
- Lots of operating systems – there are loads of ‘em in Mobile. And most of them are quite limited (see next point)
- Java (which is on most devices) was locked down – you could get a J2ME file on to a device, but you couldn’t get it to do much due to the way the environment is in a sandbox
- Savvy users – many users could spot a virus file
- What’s the point – if you motivated by mischief, you could cause some disruption for example, but if you were in it for the money, the motivation was that much harder to find
On a parallel track in the last few years though, Internet malware, viruses, phishing, and other scams have sky-rocketed in volume, and complexity – from keyboard loggers, to rootkits, to proper system-killing files, the Internet is way less safe than it was previously – and the problem is getting worse.
I’ll save from guessing the reasons why exactly the InterWeb has become the tool of choice for breaking people’s most valuable/used piece of consumer electronics (i.e. the PC), other than to say there is serious money to be made here – and that alone is an incredible motivator.
Meanwhile, over in Mobile-land, we are still relatively bug-free – let’s hope it stays that way with the advent of convergence devices such as the “Mobile Internet Device” and the Netbook….
[Image via: portablegadget.com]