Pinning Down the Spread of Cell Phone Viruses

walrabbit writes "Wang et al (2009) (from Albert-László Barabási's lab) modeled the spread of mobile phone viruses based on anonymised call and text logs of 6.2 million customers spread over 10,000 towers. Their simulations shows that the spread is dependent on the market share of a particular handset, human mobility and mode of spread: bluetooth or MMS or hybrid. 'We find that while Bluetooth viruses can reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spread slowly due to human mobility, offering ample opportunities to deploy antiviral software. In contrast, viruses utilizing multimedia messaging services could infect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlying call graph limits them to only a small fraction of the susceptible users. These results explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predict that once a mobile operating system's market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.' You can read the full text (PDF) and supporting online information (PDF) (with interesting modelling data and diagrams)." (Also summed up in a short article at CBC.)

One valid reason for the app store...

[ducomputergeek]

I was having this debate with someone the other night who believes that in 3 - 5 years every phone will be android. Personally I was arguing that Blackberry in the business world is pretty hard to beat and the iPhone has a sizable lead. But people tend to trade in their personal phones every couple years. Businesses usually get married to a platform and it's harder to move them away. Especially if they have invested in any applications.

I know Apple gets flamed a lot around here by people for not being open enough and forcing developers to release apps through the app store, but I've seen it as an attempt to delay and try to prevent malware on the iPhone. Personally that's one reason why I am uncool in the geek world and don't jailbreak mine. I know I've bitched about the bluetooth stack being locked down on the iPhone. I'd love to connect a freaking wireless keyboard to it sometimes. But at the same time, I see Apple's position on controlling the gateway beyond them "being evil locking people in".

You have the people harping on how cool Android will be because one won't "be locked into one app store" etc.. But in the back of my mind that just increases the risk of someone downloading some "Cool free app" that happens to be a malware app. It only has to happen a few times before the reputation gets out there. And it will happen because people see pops ups now that say, "Hey you have mal ware, down load our malware cleaner." And then they click and install nothing but malware.

And I think it is much more likely given how I've seen people use their phones on such a spur of a moment basis. The number of times I've seen people just be browsing and buy/download a ringtone or app on the spur of the moment. Especially if they are at a club and have already had a few to drink and aren't thinking. (I have to take away certain people's iphones when we go out to keep them from doing anything stupid).

Either way, I dread the day that we have to run anti-virus on our phones.

It also makes me think there are still reasons to keep the trusty old land line around.