About 1.700 mobile phone users have been questioned by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Intrado, trying to find what their reaction was to unsolicited messages sent to their phones.

The study also involved 154 people who work for service providers in Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States.

Although 8 of 10 respondents had received unsolicited mobile phone messages and warned that the intrusions will only worsen; one analyst questioned whether the problem was as significant as the study made it seem. Every communication channel gets spammed sooner or later, same way it happened to email and even Instant Messaging.

Actually the first to suffer from this plague was snail mail as everybody gets a pile of junk in their mailboxes everyday.

Participants to the survey believe the problem will get worse. Of professionals responding to the survey, 83 percent said they believe mobile spam will become a "critical issue" within the next two years. The first the users pointed as responsible for the growing amount of undesired messages were their very own mobile phone operators.

Side from the annoyance factor, consumers whose plans charge for calls or text messages received end up paying the bill for the spam. Ouch. That's the definition of spam in some ways, you end up paying for bandwidth or it charges your phone bill, not to mention its time consuming and very annoying.

The Global Business Security division of IBM has taken the initiative to study the security threat posed by viruses and worms. Results show among others that malicious software writers have gone smarter and decided to upgrade their strategies too, now looking past the traditional IT space.

Their next targets are going to be handheld devices, cellphones, wireless networks and embedded computers which include car and satellite communication systems.