Cough! Cough! Yes, That Was Your Smartphone Wheezing At YouCough! Cough! Yes, That Was Your Smartphone Wheezing At You

Believe it or not, the first mobile viruses began appearing back in mid-June 2004. The Cabir worm and Mosquito Trojan both targeted smartphones that run the Symbian Series 60 operating system, which is the most widely used smartphone platform across the world. Others targeting Windows Mobile appeared later. Should the enterprise be concerned? Hell, yeah!With wireless devices becoming more sophisticated all the time (I found an app that let's my BlackBerry manage my multiple personality disorder), malicious jerks have decided to have even more fun at our expense (apparently destroying our hard drives, sending billions of spam messages from our IP addresses or accessing our bank accounts just isn't enough for them).

While your average run-of-the-mill Java or BREW phone (read: crappy feature phone) is probably safe for the time being, phones that run Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and RIM OS are much more at risk and it's surprising to see how quickly and in how many ways naughty code writers have found to use abuse them. With more and more sensitive corporate data stored on these devices, mobile viruses are a rising threat that can't be ignored by the enterprise.

Unfortunately for IT departments, this means being the bad guy for a while, as there are some simple ways to protect enterprise data from this threat.