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F-Secure Puts Virus Protection in Your Hand

Vendor plans virus protection for Symbian-based devices, but is it necessary?

By Rick Perera, IDG News   

In a statement, the company said its new product is aimed at the security risks posed by the new generation of mobile phones and personal digital assistants that "bring the Internet to your pocket."

The "Mobile Scanner" technology will scan for any future binary viruses, script language viruses, Trojan horses, and infected e-mail attachments that should emerge. Users will be able to receive security updates over the airwaves or download them from a wired interface.

As yet, no viruses have been discovered that affect these wireless devices, acknowledges Ilkka Starck, director of F-Secure's wireless security business unit.

But the Symbian platform is already licensed to many of the major manufacturers of wireless devices, F-Secure says. And, as Starck adds,"when the volumes of EPOC-based devices increase in the future ... there will most likely be third-party software. You can imagine games and utilities and whatever ... it's fair to say that the risk that unwanted software also enters the device increases."

Open to Attack?

"We have an open programming platform," says Symbian spokesperson Paul Cockerton, "which encourages developers to write applications for it. There is obviously the problem that some people may write malicious programs."

Symbian has already taken several measures to prevent such attacks, Cockerton says. For example, the licensed Symbian operating system is in ROM, so it can't be tampered with, and Symbian is working with RSA Security, whose "security protocols enable mobile users to access and transfer information in a very safe, robust, and secure environment."

"We've been doing this for almost 20 years now, so we've been always been very conscious of user security," says Cockerton.

But F-Security's Starck says his company is doing things a little differently. "We are the first ones announcing the antivirus [product]. One of the main criteria for antivirus is that there has to be updates. The databases have to be updated, quite often actually .... We think that when and if viruses hit some users, we are able to modify the database so that we are able to fight against this."