Fighting malware and spam

Virusability of modern mobile environments

Vesselin Bontchev FRISK

The vast majority of currently existing malware for mobile devices (PDAs, smart phones, etc.) is for mobile phones running the Symbian S60 R2 operating system - with just some proof-of-concept malicious programs existing for the J2ME, PalmOS and Windows Mobile 2003 environments. The paper examines the security features introduced in the newer versions of the mobile operating systems - Symbian R3, Windows Mobile 6.0, J2ME - and explains why they are much less vulnerable to self-propagating code. While we stop short of claiming that these environments are virus-proof, we maintain that viruses are unlikely to become a huge problem for them.