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Viruses and hacking on mobile phones are still rare but attacks are a looming danger as increasing numbers of people access the Internet and download files with their handsets, experts say.
A survey released last week at the industry's (1) Mobile World Congress showed that only 2.1 percent of people had been struck by a virus themselves and only 11.6 percent knew someone who had been affected by one.
The poll by IT security specialist McAfee, based on 2,000 people in Britain, the United States and Japan, showed that 86.3 percent had had no experience of mobile phone viruses.
Virus attacks in Japan, the most developed mobile phone market in the world, were far more commonplace than elsewhere.
The website www.mobilephoneviruses.com, which tracks incidents of mobile virus infections, lists a handful of examples such as Skulls, Velasco and Commwarrior.
The latter infected about 110,000 phones in Spain last year, attacking phones running Nokia's (2) Symbian operating system. It spread via MMS messages,text messages.
Graham Cluley,a consultant at Sophos, another IT security firm,said there were about 350,000 viruses written to attack computers running Microsoft Windows and about 200 known ones for mobile phone operating systems.
Computer viruses were now being written by organised crime gangs to steal money and personal information, while mobile phone viruses "have tended to be written by kids to show off," he said.
A 12-year-old boy wrote a virus for the new Apple iPhone which disables it,"turning it into a brick," said Cluley, and a user had to go to the boy's Internet site and download some software.
At French network operator Orange, a spokesperson explained that with the convergence of the worlds of IT and telecoms the threat is going to get more and more serious. AFP
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