Cabir in the U.S.A., OMG! :)

There have been some really good fear-inducing stories in the news lately. Steve Litchfield has written the Symbian virus hype-busting article.

F-secure's blog has a good explanation of why Cabir in the U.S.A. is not really something to worry about -- mainly because Series 60 phones do not have much market penetration.

Sony-Ericsson UIQ interface phones do make up more of the market, due mainly to cingular wireless.

As of January of this year the source code for two different versions of Cabir have been released. It is surprising that no one has made the changes necessary to port Cabir to UIQ. A large number of Cabir variants are simply hex edited versions of the original. The new breed of cell phone virus writers either hasn't shown up for work yet or is just incredibly lazy and unskilled.

Trend Micro has apparently considered this as well as the potential size of the American cell phone market in making the decision to sell a UIQ version of their scanner. They are a bit early as no UIQ malware has yet been released.