The risk of computer viruses infecting mobile phones has risen sharply, U.S.-based security software firm SimWorks said on Wednesday after it found 52 new damaging software programs in one day.
The newly identified programs belong to a category of virus known as “trojans,” which get into computers hidden in other software.
The trojans found recently are mostly hidden in games for smartphones that run on the Series 60 Symbian operating system used in models from Nokia.
Closely held SimWorks said the catch doubled the number of known mobile viruses. “This is a significant development as until now we’ve usually found mobile trojans two or three at a time at the most,” Chief Executive Aaron Davidson said.
Symbian, in which Nokia and other handset vendors own stakes, is the most widely used operating system for smartphones, which run small computer-like applications such as navigation programs, email and enterprise planning software.
Last year, about 20 million smartphones were sold around the world on a total of 680 million handsets. While still modest in number, smartphones are forecast to account for roughly one-third of all handsets sold towards 2010.
Mobile industry and security software vendors say the risks are still quite small -- none of the new 52 trojans has been found “in the wild” where they can be downloaded by consumers --but the risk is growing together with the amount of new malicious software, known in the industry as “malware.”
Just as on personal computers, viruses, trojans and other malware can cause a phone to be corrupted, requiring a factory reset and the loss of all contacts and other data, or the phone could start to send expensive photo messages to all contacts in its memory.
“It’s a huge amount,” said chief research officer Mikko Hypponen at security software firm F-secure, referring to the 52 trojans. Only this morning, his company had identified 43 different mobile viruses, he added.
“(But) one is still very unlikely to actually receive a virus on your handset,” Hypponen said.
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Security market surging
For software security firms, the wireless sector has so far been a minor source of income. F-secure made less than 1 percent of its revenues from the mobile industry in 2004.
“The smarter the phones get the bigger the problems get,” said Sean Maloney, head of Intel’s mobility unit. Research firm visiongain expects to see the mobile anti-virus market growing to $12.2 billion by 2007 from just $723 million in 2004. “We believe it is only a matter of time before a more serious virus targeted at smart phones strikes,” visiongain’s analyst Jean Pierre Aubertin said in a statement.
“Mass outbreak would be quite horrible actually,” Simworks’s Davidson told Reuters. Potential viruses could spread much faster on mobile devices than on e-mail which is on usually only during working hours, he said.
Davidson said that if there were a way of ensuring that once an infected message was received it would infect the device, the spread could be very fast.
“The cost to users would be potentially huge as such a virus would keep pumping copies of itself through the device until the operator shut down the users account,” he added.
Marko Merenheimo, senior vice president at Nokia’s enterprise solutions unit, said the world’s top handset maker is closely following the virus situation. He declined to estimate when the first major outbreak of a mobile virus might occur. “There is no reason for panic. The amount of viruses is expected to increase and their nature is expected to change. Now even at worst they are just proof-of-concept,” Merenheimo said.