Defeating the viruses in your Palm
Source: silicon.com
Last week, I was reflecting on the vulnerability of widely used operating systems to malicious code such as viruses. In very timely fashion, PalmSource has come along with proposals to harden the Palm operating system in its next version.
The primary aim of PalmSource is to encourage the corporate market to start taking Palm devices seriously and to prefer them to rivals with Microsoft or Symbian software. This will be a tough job, given that most corporate IT departments feel most comfortable with a Microsoft system, which seems familiar, even though significantly different.
Fear of nasties such as viruses is an interesting lever to use on the business market. Indeed, if corporate buyers can be persuaded to wake up to security issues there are a number of very serious issues needing attention. Whether or not IT has formulated a company PDA policy people are certainly buying company PDAs. One favourite use for the company PDA is to store a complete collection of PIN numbers, usually unencrypted.
Vital company documents are perfectly likely to be transferred to the PDA, as the first accessory most company users want is a synchronisation cradle. The situation has been dangerous enough when the main risk was that the PDA might be stolen, and the thieves might be sophisticated enough to take advantage of the stored data. Organisations that have sophisticated policies for securing their fixed local and wide area networks typically have little in place to manage the security of laptops, let alone PDAs.
