The Security Mentor

Be Concerned

Your cellular phone is a computer. If it's fairly new it can send and receive data, so it's a computer on a network. Like your home PC, it requires care and street smarts now.

For one thing that means being careful about what you download. Be careful even about software from real companies. Recently there were dangerous copies of a game called Mosquito circulating. The dangerous copies would start sending out premium rate text messages and hit you with unexpected bills. At first security people suspected that someone had tampered with the game. Today antivirus firm F-Secure reports that the makers of the game put that in as a feature to deter illegal copying. Download an illegal copy, and boom.

But Don't Panic

So far almost all the infectious software for cellphones has been experiments to see if it could be done. One "virus" actually asked permission to install itself! When you read a scary article, look towards the bottom to see if it's talking about something found "in the wild".

Check your phone's security settings. Some of them ship with the security features turned off. No wonder there have been scary stories about phones being turned into bugging devices by remote control. Learn to control your phone, just like you learned to lock your car doors.