Mirrored Intelligence
As more mobile viruses are written, their strengths and abilities grow….they almost mirror a baby’s learning….They start by crying for attention (proof of concept), moving on to crawling (MMS/BlueTooth in the wild), and now, they well on their way to walking; they’ve learnt cross platform propagation. This baby’s growing up fast.
Looking at the PC baby, it’s taken years in the PC world to move from the early boot sector virii to where we are today…The interesting thing is that it’s almost exponential growth…As soon as one vector is discovered, the next vector is almost ready. The Mobile world is too, following exponential-like growth (from memory; 1 in 2004, 129 in 2005, and over 400 already in 2006). The next few years are going to be interesting times, if for nothing else, but to watch virii and the IT response.
I, like most, believe the future is not in re-action to virus, rather prevention. These 2 prongs are tighter code and anomaly detection. Tighter/more secure coding is something that is only human. The other train, anomaly detection is a rapidly growing market in the IP/Network Space, and something that will be able to mitigate virii in real time.
With the rapid growth of our Mobile Baby, I don’t think it’d hurt to start getting some anomaly detection hooks into the non-IP world of phones. Virii are, and will continue to in the future, spread via MMS. Looking even further into the future, past the GPRS world of MMS virii, there is another threat in the ‘next generation’ mobile networks currently being built. These are the HSDPA/GGSN/IMS and other acronyms that carriers are actively deploying, making the phone a walking IP addresses. If we’re not careful, it will only a matter of time before phones will be in botnets.