Mobile security: when will it become necessary?

The growing popularity of mobile working has given rise to concerns about the risk of mobile viruses and other attacks on handsets and PDAs. But how real is this threat? In contrast to the world of PCs, where the number of viruses "in the wild" runs into the thousands, there are still fewer than 400 mobile viruses. Many of these have been proof-of-concept code, only seen in a specific test area or research laboratory.

Experts disagree as to the precise reason for this lack of viral attacks. The most obvious explanation is the huge variation in the mobile handset market. Infecting PCs via the internet requires the creation of malicious code that will work on a Windows PC operating system, for example XP.

A hacker can be reasonably certain that such a piece of code is likely to run on the vast majority of home and office machines it encounters. However, mobile handsets all work differently. Generally speaking, only the top-of-the-range smartphones (two percent of the mobile market) have decent processing power and storage, and while many modern handsets can handle J2ME and multi-media messaging services, millions of older phones cannot.