Mobile security

I have not had a virus infect my laptop for years; in fact, I have forgotten they had ever existed. I credit this to the advances made in Internet security software and my extreme paranoia prodding me to automatically delete e-mails with foreign addresses and strange-sounding subjects. Oh, I failed to mention, it would help if you update your antivirus files daily, too. My only recent memory of a virus threat was exactly a year ago when the CommWarrior mobile virus tried to infect my Nokia series 60 smartphone via MMS and simultaneously my laptop via Bluetooth. I played detective, found the infected mobile phone in the office and crushed the devil with a simple file management tool. Life then went on with no worries till I got to read some recent articles on mobile security.

It seems the threat of a mass-based mobile virus attack is no longer science fiction. There will be two billion mobile phones by 2008; that sort of adoption rate and market size is more than certain to be accompanied by a mobile security threat just as overwhelming. Also consider this: there was far much less PCs a few years back but recall the mayhem that the MyDoom virus did to Internet users. Now try imagining the same but happening on mobile phones; we may just have some full-blown chaos.

Juniper Research reports that the mobile security business, which includes anti-virus, mobile identity management and data encryption, will be a $5-billion market by 2010. The surge in this area will be driven by the threat of mobile virus and malware, dependence of mobile users on delivery and storage of sensitive data, and hacking of corporate networks by mobile devices. I believe the most vulnerable market segment in the next few years would be smartphones and BlackBerry devices utilized by data-hungry business users. These business-centric devices are particularly becoming attractive targets for malware writers for these devices tend to hold important corporate data. I realistically don’t see a catastrophic mobile virus threat to emerge anytime till after 2010 since most popular mobile phones run on so many different operating systems unlike the vast majority of PCs which run on Microsoft’s Windows OS.

Every so often we will encounter low-threat mobile viruses like Cardtrp and Pbstealer, which penetrate a device’s address book and calendar, causing phones to broadcast the data publicly via Bluetooth to cause some minor hysteria. But awaiting such threats to become more sophisticated and damaging is not the smartest way to approach wireless security. I recommend then that we learn from the lessons of the past where we were exposed at our desktops and try to avoid instead of committing the same mistakes on our mobile devices. Handset and network manufacturers, telecom operators and anti-virus companies, this is your wake-up call.

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Patrick R. Garcia is the managing director of Bidshot Wireless Services. For comments or suggestions, e-mail [email protected].