The viruses that can stop mobiles in their tracks

It the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki this year, athletes and spectators were invited to download an application that would show event results on their mobiles. But a hacker exploited a security loophole in smartphones to deliver a virus over the Bluetooth radio network. So many people were infected that the authorities had to set up a special booth to remove the virus from their handsets.

Telecoms companies and business users alike are waking up to a new threat. The security industry had been sceptical about mobile viruses; although a number of researchers had demonstrated they were possible, only a handful of smartphone users had been affected until recently. That is starting to change.

Risto Siilasmaa, the chief executive of F-Secure, a Finnish computer security company, says the threat to mobile phones is growing more rapidly than PC viruses did in the 1990s. At the EU-backed ISSE (Information Security Solutions Europe) conference in Budapest earlier this month, he outlined the scale of the problem: "Mobile viruses have been found in 30 countries. Operators have had to block multimedia messaging traffic, and 3.5 per cent of MMS traffic is already 'malware' [programs designed to cause harm]."