Antivirus for Windows Mobile: Do You Need it...?

[aldana]

Hi Guys,

Is this sort of protection necessary? Have you or anyone you know that uses Windows Mobile had problems with a virus on their device? It seems that this product is aimed more at the corporate user who carries sensitive information on their device.

I have been using mobile platforms since Windows 2003 SE and never encountered any issues with viruses, however i have now a HTC Touch HD with WM6.1 and since it's getting more advancd everyday, I'm kind of worried if there is anyvirus which can damage my device. I'm not worried for data loss, because I sync with MS Outlook and both verison (Outlook and Mobile device) are syncronized on a daily basis, so I have a backup. I'm also trying the beta version on microsoft "My Phone".

[hotmail]

For the vast majority of people, compeletely unnecessary. At this point there are very few viruses written for mobile platforms. I think you can count the total (all platforms, not just WinMo) on one hand. You'd just be taking up valuable resources on your device. I suppose if you do all your banking, have alot of critical / private info stored on your device, and install anything / everything you come across... then maybe.

[ibeqa]

Hi Guys,

Is this sort of protection necessary? Have you or anyone you know that uses Windows Mobile had problems with a virus on their device? It seems that this product is aimed more at the corporate user who carries sensitive information on their device.

I have been using mobile platforms since Windows 2003 SE and never encountered any issues with viruses, however i have now a HTC Touch HD with WM6.1 and since it's getting more advancd everyday, I'm kind of worried if there is anyvirus which can damage my device. I'm not worried for data loss, because I sync with MS Outlook and both verison (Outlook and Mobile device) are syncronized on a daily basis, so I have a backup. I'm also trying the beta version on microsoft "My Phone".

If you would use search button you would find this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=386490 and this http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=317441&highlight=antivirus, and probably more threads!

Cheers

[DaveTheTytnIIGuy]

Absolutely not. I'm pretty paranoid, so I bought a one year license for Norton Smartphone Security, and after almost 8 months of use, I realized that the only thing it had done to my device was slow it down. One feature of NSS is the ability to see every virus definition it had in its database. You want to know how many viruses there were in its definitions? About 12, maybe a couple more by now.

And after reading up about each one on Symantec's site, I learned that most of them affected Symbian phones, and the viruses were from obscure sites you shouldn't go to anyway. So unless you go to every site in the Internet, run every file you find you can download, and then somehow disable hard resetting in the event you get a virus, there is no reason you would need any mobile Anti-Virus.

Dave

[eljoe]

I agree that today there's no much risk at all...but i use it mostly because of the personal firewall...i think today there are more chances to be hacked when you are connected to a network than being affected by a virus....so i use it with real-time scan disable and personal firewall enabled....

[Rudegar]

as virus's don't port
nobody bother sending
virus's for mobile to random
mail addys hoping they happened to
be opened on a wm device
the market is still too small
same deal with infecting sites with viral
so wm users get it also most people here
don't use Pie because it's a rather poor browser

I personally see the few wm virus's as more like
proof of concept then anything else

a few weeks ago when they had their security
thingy and they hacked all the browsers pretty fast
nobody did managed to hack the mobile devices
why?
because they're just soo much more secure then desktops?
or
because they're still too few for them to bother doing the work to find
the holes?

I think the later

some day it will be impotent but not yet

[sdlopez83]

If your a member to this site chances are that you are flashing, ehem flashing often, so if this is the case you needn't fear. If the a virus where to be inseminated into your little device---Simply hardreset and start anew. My 2 cents. Even if i had a virus scanner and a virus was indeed detected and disposed of, I would still hard reset. Therefore pocket virus scanners are superfluous in the pocket oc world. Just hardreset it and forget it!

[Barkleyfan]

With all the MMS I get forwarded, it's cheap insurance. Symantec can't even support WM6.1, so I haven't bothered trying with 6.5. There are others, however, that seem to be quite stable with both WM versions, and take up little resources.

[H_L]

i have a touch hd and i was stupid enough to get a virus by downloading games and themes by torrents (thats my punishment for doing somthing illegally) anyway symptoms include: changing dates and times on the clock which means all my messages and calls where all mixed up, intermittently blanking my phone book (but the numbers were not wiped off the sim) i just couldn't see them, the storage card wouldn't show up, the battery would go flat in 3hours with absolutely nothing going and the phone was freakin slow took 5min to get into my photos. it turnes out there was a hidden file installed on the phone as autorun.inf you delete it then the phone works but it comes back to terrorize you.
avg pop up as soon as i connected the phone to the pc.

[Monty Burns]

that sounds more like your phone was screwed.

A virus written for a phone will not run on a PC as its a "diferent language" and api's etc. It would be very suprising of AVG desktop to detect a windows mobile virus on a phone....