E-security specialist McAfee has announced VirusScan Mobile, as a weapon for fighting viruses and other threats to Windows Mobile devices.
Although the threat of mobile viruses isn’t exactly comparable to that on PCs, it is growing as smartphones get ever closer to PCs in terms of capabilities.
Recent mobile threats have included viruses like “Duts” (a viral code attached to executable files) and “Xrove” (which can infect devices via PC syncing). McAfee also claimed that mobile variants of spyware and phishing over text messaging have also been identified.
Luckily, McAfee claims that its VirusScan Mobile protects Windows Mobile smartphones at their entry points; i.e. SMS, MMS and email. It sits on your phone and automatically scans incoming and outgoing data for malicious code.
If mobile security becomes as big a problem as on PCs, then no doubt you’ll need to update it every six months as you do on your PC.
As Nokia and others are constantly reminding us, that’s not a phone in your pocket - it’s a multimedia computer.
