PDA security starts to improve
As was noted in PDAs make a comeback, personal digital assistants (PDAs) have returned to sales growth after a few years of modest growth or even decline. After a period where innovation came in small doses, the sector now finds itself dealing with an issue that must have looked very small indeed during the good times of the late 1990s - security.
In fact, this is a theme that urgently confronts the whole mobile computing field as a particular problem. If a device can be taken out of the protection of the network, how can the information on it be secured while it is on its travels? Indeed, how can these devices be protected so that they don't themselves become unwitting Trojans for all sorts of malware to make its way back inside the network when they return?
Let's ignore for now the plethora of products that claim to protect handhelds from the threat of viruses that execute on thedevice itself. The risk is unproven for the moment, and it is hard to see that the cost justifies the investment. Inevitably, handhelds will need anti-virus protection - especially the Windows Mobile platform - because history tells us you never need less security, always more and different.
