The Increased Number of Smartphones to Facilitate Mobile Viruses

It seems that the adoption of smartphones during the past few years and their continuous growth in the future could easily offer more possibilities for mobile viruses to spread into the wild. Currently, there are more than 600 mobile viruses known to exist, which raises the risk of getting infected when using a high-end mobile phone.

According to Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a director for Northeastern University’s Center for Complex Network Research, mobile viruses have seen a fast development, especially when compared with computer ones. To be more precise, he says that mobile viruses have reached the development level that took computer viruses about 20 years to reach, in only two years.

Given this fast development, the risk of getting such a virus is quite high, and there are two ways in which this type of viruses can be transmitted. One of them, which can be easily blocked by mobile phone carriers, is through MMS, while the other is via Bluetooth, which is also limited, mainly due to the fact that the infected phone needs to get in contact with a new device to transmit the virus.

“Right now, we’re under the percolation threshold. Only 5 percent of users have smartphones and even those are fragmented into different operating systems—the largest one doesn’t even reach 3 percent of the overall market…We predict that once any operating system reaches 10 percent of the whole user market, then the percolation transition will happen, and then the [viruses] will spread everywhere,” Barabasi stated for BBC News.

For this scenario to become reality, the virus doesn't necessarily have to go through MMS to each and every single handset that sports a certain operating system, but it would only have to cast a wide net before a response from the operator comes.

On the other hand, according to Carlo Longino at Techdirt, there are some issues with this theory, starting with the market share figures, as Nokia’s Series 40 platform can already be found on hundreds of millions of devices, so the target population is already there. At the same time, an MMS will go through wireless operators' servers, which will find it quite easy to block the virus transmitted this way.