Don't Mistake A Lull In Mobile Virus FUD For Its Disappearance
from the have-they-forgotten-about-us? dept
Just because it's been a while since we'd talked about a security company spreading some FUD about mobile malware, doesn't mean that it had stopped. While the main purveyor of the stuff, F-Secure, seems to have chilled out a bit, other vendors are carrying on. This time, it's Kaspersky, with one of its analysts going into a Faraday cage with a German TV crew, and intentionally infecting a phone with the Cabir virus, so "everyone in the room understood that mobile malware is a real threat." It certainly is a threat when you infect the phone intentionally and ignore all the warnings it throws up, but the real risk of your phone getting a virus remains negligible. You've still got to wonder why, if mobile viruses are so common, why a TV crew would need to go into a Faraday cage (that's impervious to radio waves, but not to PR stunts) and have to get a security firm to put on this sort of demo. After all, if our phones are at such great risk, couldn't they have just found somebody with a virus?Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Going into the faraday cage would have meant that the virus would have been transmitted directly from one 'phone to the other, which seems slightly pointless, since the signal could just as easily have been sent accross a normal room.
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the only FUD here is techdirt's
had the author actually read the kaspersky labs blog entry he'd have seen that they were showing the camera *how* cabir infects, not trying to prove that it was a serious threat...
in fact it was explicitly stated that only a few instances of cabir were known to be in the wild in all of germany, so the author is pretty much putting words in kaspersky's mouth when suggesting that kaspersky has claimed it's a common threat...
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Stunt or not, does not matter
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MyMobiSafe.com
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Safety in Cells
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device
megaupload files
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