What is Malware?
There’s an article at Yahoo! Tech mentioning a survey from SMobile Systems saying "one in 63 smart phones powered by the Symbian OS are infected with some form of malware".
Can this be true? At first I thought not. We are all used to scare stories from Anti Virus vendors saying phones are insecure when, in fact, unlike on the PC, a user has to knowingly install an application for it to do any damage. Ok, there was the recent mishap of the Symbian Signed process that allowed malware to go through. However, this was an isolated incident and affected very few people.
All this made me think more about what is malware. For example, Apple rejects some applications from the App store just because they "reported the device stats, model, OS version, etc." without the users’ permission. If this kind of software is malware I suppose SMobile’s claim might be true. However, can an application be truly considered as being malware when the device information is being used to run the service as opposed to stealing information for fraudulent use?
UPDATE 1 Aug: Symbian Foundation has done some research on this and it turns out the malware SMobile found is very old and only on pre-2006 phones.
Related Articles: