Attack of the mobile viruses

I'm Robert Vamosi, Senior Editor CNET. Today I'm talking to you about mobile viruses. We haven't heard a lot about mobile viruses, and that's in part because mobile devices lack a dominant operating system. But, in certain parts of the world, one or two operating systems have moved ahead. One, the Symbian operating system, currently enjoys roughly 70% saturation in Europe and in Asia, and that's enough for hackers to start writing code for mobile devices.

So how are they doing it? What are the vectors that they're using to attack mobile devices? One is pretty common and it's shared with the PC at home, and that is to download an infected file onto your mobile device. Another vector is direct, and by direct I mean sharing something with another device. We saw that in PCs by sharing floppy disks that were infected, and in the mobile world you can share a memory card with photographs or songs with someone else and infect their system pretty easily.

Now you don't have to be in the physical same space as someone else to infect them, and for a mobile device it can send out what's called an MMS signal, multimedia message signal, and we've already seen a virus called Com Warrior do this, where it's been able to infect mobile devices worldwide just going after the address book found in each mobile device.

But the most pernicious way to infect a mobile device, I think, is BlueTooth. Here, you could be sitting at a sporting event and you sit down next to somebody who has an infected mobile device and you need to go make a phone call and you see a message on your screen that it wants to accept a call from a phone that you've never heard of before. Yes/no. It keeps repeating the message over and over again. Antivirus vendors tell me that the number one reason people infect their own mobile device is that they need to make a phone call, so they say yes and they accept the virus onto their system just so they have access to the outside world. In doing so, however, you have now become a vector and you are now spreading the virus to other mobile devices around you.

So what's the solution? Well that depends on the vector. For the first three vectors that we discussed, download, direct and MMS, I would recommend installing antivirus protection for your mobile device. For BlueTooth, know that it has a limited range of 30 to 100 feet, so rather than accept an infected message from a cell phone that you don't know, I recommend that you simply walk away.