Nokia Promotion

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1. Steve M

   Short answer? No. You really don’t need any such software.

   Long answer, if you care to read why: “Malware” (the term commonly used to describe viruses, spyware, worms, trojans, etc., software that’s made with the intent of harming / hijacking / stealing data) tends to be made for the Windows desktop platform. This doesn’t mean it can’t exist for other platforms, it’s just the case that 95+% of the malware out there is made targeted for Microsoft Windows.

   Malware tends to work predominately in two ways. In one way, the malware creators “social engineer,” or fool or trick you, into launching the malware yourself. These are usually called trojans, and are more predominant. The other way is when the malware targets a specific flaw in a user’s software, like a web browser. These are less predominant but tend to be more dangerous, because even if you’d never be fooled into running malware manually, these will run anyway and infect you. But again, these tend to target Microsoft Internet Explorer, as it is still the most predominantly used web browser, and also tends to have more flaws than the other options (Opera, or my favorite, Mozilla Firefox.)

   But back to your question about your Nokia platform. You have a two-fold protection from this type of thing. One, the software is less complex. Any “holes” or flaws in the web browser probably wouldn’t be able to be exploited to do more than crash your browser or phone until you reboot (and that’s just speculation / theoretically.) and two, your platform really doesn’t run native code. I think that phone can run Java apps, but they run in a “sandbox” and really can’t make any changes / do any damage to the system at large. Also, being that your phone isn’t a widely used platform, it’s also not a major target for malware creators to spend their time on. But I wouldn’t totally rely on this last point to keep you safe on any platform

   In conclusion, use common sense while surfing on any platform, Windows, Mac, cell phones, anything. Don’t run things that aren’t from trusted sources, and don’t open email attachments you weren’t expecting, and use Firefox+NoScript+Adblock and Windows Firewall on Microsoft Windows, and you really shouldn’t even need an antivirus there either.

   Hope this helps.

   Posted on 26-Nov-09 at 10:34 am | Permalink

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