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McAfee Protects Your Network From Your PDA

Software will prevent the transfer of viruses from PDA to PC, but can't stop wireless attacks.

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

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You work at home. You work in the office. And to transfer your files back and forth, you use your handheld computer. You could be putting your company's corporate network at risk.

That's why Network Associates' McAfee division released new software Monday that's designed to protect corporate networks from viruses carried on personal digital assistants and other handheld computers.

Called McAfee VirusScan Handheld, the software aims to help companies deal with the growing number of staff who are going mobile.

Virus Carriers

Users can easily download a virus in a Word or Excel file to their PDA from their home PC, and then introduce the virus into their corporate network when they synchronize the device with their PC at work, says Ryan McGee, product marketing manager for VirusScan.

"Handheld devices are almost as dangerous to a corporate network as the floppy disk," McGee says.

McAfee's new product is installed on a user's PC at work and on their PDA and scans all files for viruses as the files are transferred to and from the PC. The software checks for "all the regular types of viruses you'd be able to check for using a PC version of the product," McGee says.

The VirusScan Handheld product can be downloaded to a PC from the Web and installs itself the next time the PDA and the PC are synchronized. The software updates itself automatically over the Internet, and is available for each of the four main device platforms: Palm's Palm OS, Microsoft's Pocket PC and Windows CE, and Symbian's EPOC.

McAfee VirusScan Handheld is essentially the same product that the company already offers for home users, but is priced and packaged for businesses, McGee says. Pricing starts at $12 per device for 5000 devices.

Wireless Weakness

While McAfee's software may keep viruses from being passed between a handheld computer and a corporate network, it won't prevent viruses from being delivered wirelessly to the PDA in the first place. Only one or two significant viruses have hit wireless PDAs and cell phones, but many industry watchers see wireless as the next big challenge for security software vendors--and for hackers.

"As virus writers become more versed in writing for that [wireless] environment," offering protection against viruses delivered over the airwaves will become "critical," McGee says.

"We're working on that challenge and we hope to introduce a product soon, hopefully before the virus writers get there," McGee says. "We're challenged in [the wireless] environment with the processor power and the memory that's available to us. The good side is that the virus writers are challenged by those restrictions, too."

F-Secure, one of McAfee's rivals, became one of the first vendors to offer antivirus software for wireless devices. F-Secure's Mobile Scanner Technology, announced earlier this month, works with wireless devices based on the EPOC platform. Symantec has also shown an early version of an antivirus product for wireless devices.

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