Mobile Phone Security Worries Spread

As Big Blue joins a growing list of high-tech companies and researchers warning of the increasing danger of mobile phone spam and viruses, one analyst said the threat should come as no surprise to the industry.

"The whole industry has been notoriously lazy. Their whole attitude has been 'viruses are for PCs,'" Brian Pellegrini, wireless analyst at ABI Research, told TechNewsWorld. "At this point people are starting to notice because the public is starting to notice."

Texting Troubles

The IBM report warned that viruses and worms that attack mobile devices, wireless networks and embedded computers will become "epidemic" in 2005.

The majority of mobile phone spam comes in the form of text messages. This has become far more easy to accomplish with the rise of text messaging from Web sites.

A study released yesterday by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Intrado, a vendor of emergency communications services, found that eight of 10 mobile phone users reported receiving some type of spam.

Although the problem is more severe in Asia and Europe, where there are many more mobile phone subscribers and laws against phone spam are either weak or non-existent, the problem is likely to grow in the United States as well.

"It will become a bigger and bigger issue until someone deals with it," Pellegrini said.

Speedier Spam

The increase in wireless data transfer and speedier transfer technology, which treats voice transmission as data, has made spreading viruses easier. The convergence of phones and PDAs into "smartphones," which are basically mini-computers complete with office applications, also gives virus writers greater reach.

That's because instead of having phones that run on a multitude of closed operating systems unique to a vendor, the smartphones are likely to run on a more standardized operating system, such as Windows Mobile or Symbian, and viruses must be written to target a particular operating system or application.

Bluetooth Gaps

Yet another inroad for malware is the fact that "Bluetooth is notoriously horrendous for security problems," Pellegrini said.

The technology, which allows wireless devices to talk to each other, also allows viruses to spread through the air by searching for any other device in the area that is open to discovering Bluetooth hot spots and communicating with it.

But the problem is not without solutions.

"Companies can start doing what ISPs have done," he said. "They can start scanning transmissions and figure out what the patterns are so they can block them. This is something that everybody is responsible for. Companies should work together to set up an integrated solution, which would be easier to do in phone world than in the Internet world because there are limited networks and vendors."