Imagine this: a company’s chief financial officer uses his smart phone to download a game while waiting at an airport-but the game contains a virus that sends all the data on the phone to a Web site, and the company’s financial results get posted on the Internet a week before the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Or, a mobile sales representative’s infected phone allows a hacker to siphon off customer account numbers and personal information.
Those are worst-case security scenarios, granted. But personal computer security provider McAfee Inc. is introducing a product to prevent such situations by protecting phones with an anti-virus product called VirusScan Mobile.
McAfee, which has made a name for itself in the personal computing space, said the mobile security software defends phones against viruses, Trojan Horse malware and other attacks that can come through mobile e-mail, messaging and Internet downloads. Much like computer anti-virus programs, VirusScan Mobile checks for and eliminates found viruses, whether they come via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or carrier networks. The product enters the market at a point when mobile safety measures are becoming increasingly important to carriers, businesses and consumers.
McAfee said it plans to offer its consumer product as a $30 download for a year’s subscription, with an enterprise product available as well as an embedded version for manufacturers. McAfee plans to introduce a mobile firewall in the second quarter, as well as a network-level virus scanner that could be used by network operators. The company noted that network operators could offer or subsidize the anti-virus program for customers through their own Web sites.
Phone viruses first appeared a few years ago, and most were written by experts as proof that such things could be done, according to Drew Carter, senior product manager of mobile initiatives for McAfee. McAfee’s Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team, which researches and combats viruses, predicted earlier this year that 2006 would see a significant rise in mobile viruses and malware.
“It does look like in the future, this could be a much bigger problem,” Carter said. In general, he said the goal for mobile security should be “to be more proactive than we were in the PC space,” where as many as half the computers connected to the Internet don’t have sufficient protection against viruses and can be co-opted by hackers.
While rare, mobile-phone attacks have happened. In Japan several years ago, a cell-phone virus sent via e-mail triggered infected phones to call the Japanese equivalent of 911 and swamped the phone lines. The hacking of Paris Hilton’s Sidekick III put a high-profile face on mobile security last year in the United States. One virus now carried on U.S. cellular networks is the commwarrior virus, which sends itself out via Bluetooth and multimedia messaging as a randomly named file, then raids the victim’s address book to send itself out again-potentially triggering a hefty messaging bill.
McAfee’s product already has been launched in Japan in partnership with NTT DoCoMo Inc., and protects 37 handset models in that country and 17 million customers around the world, according to McAfee. Building mobile security software for wireless devices has special challenges, Carter said, adding, “It doesn’t really work to take PC security and whittle it down for a phone.”
For example, he noted, computer users are likely to tolerate virus updating that leaves them unable to perform other operations, but phone users want to be able to take and make calls despite whatever else their phone may be doing.
The size of the embedded application is 240 kilobytes, and it uses less than 500 Kb when running, according to Carter. The downloadable version is larger: 450 Kb as downloaded, and it uses 850 Kb when running.
McAfee claims that its new product is the only end-to-end security offering for mobile devices, and said it would announce additional partnerships related to VirusScan Mobile at the 3GSM conference this week.
According to McAfee, Virus-Scan Mobile is immediately available for smart phones running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC, Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone, Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC and Windows Mobile 5 Smart Phone, as well as Symbian Series 60 and Symbian UIQ.
