03.09.09
Mobile Phone Viruses: A Summary
You get a strange message on your Bluetooth-enabled smart phone. The display says that someone from a Panasonic phone wants to send you a message—accept or not? You press no but the message returns. And the message keeps returning and returning…
Are you aware of what to do next? Do you even suspect or realize that your mobile device is about to be infected with one of about 150 known mobile-device viruses? What are the options for mobile phone virus protection?
Mobile phone viruses like Cabir, uses Bluetooth to infect users, and is found in some 30 countries worldwide, including the United States. So why aren’t mobile viruses well known in this country? A mobile-device virus could one day steal your identity or lock you out of your house!
In order for there to be mobile viruses, there must be a dominant operating system. After years of proprietary, and therefore diverse, operating systems, smart-phone manufacturers have begun adopting Symbian 8 as their platform of choice. It is estimated that in 2006 Symbian has about 70 percent of the world market for all phones, and Microsoft Windows Mobile has about 10 percent, while the rest is a combination of lesser-used platforms. In the United States, Symbian historically was only about 10 percent of the market. Thus, we haven’t seen or been affected by mobile-device viruses, as Europe and Southeast Asia have.
Below are the top ways that viruses are transferred.
Bluetooth viruses:
Mobile devices can get infected in four known ways, with Bluetooth the most pernicious. You’d think that after years of e-mail-based computer viruses, people would know how not to infect themselves with a virus–that they shouldn’t, for example, open an attachment sent by a stranger.
Memory cards:
If people start sharing memory cards to swap photos and music on their phones, we could start to see viruses spreading much faster in the mobile universe. This method might also install a Bluetooth virus.
MMS viruses and downloads:
A third way for a mobile device to get infected is via a Multimedia Message Service (MMS) virus such as Commwarrior.
Protection is coming:
Many companies are now offering mobile phone anti-malware protection and combined with mobile phone anti-theft protection. Expect greater protections to be on the market as mobile phone proliferate and operating system standards consolidate.
Google Analytics vs. Omniture: Which One is Right for Me?
A lot has changed since the early days of Google’s entrance into web analytics, and because of the rapid-fire frequency of Google’s product enhancements, getting up-to-date reviews and insight into the products is a challenge.
A search on Google for “Google Analytics vs. Omniture” serves a page full of results that largely predate Google’s (perhaps) most significant and recent update, which occurred at the end of October, 2008. This update was so significant that the NY Times covered it.
The perception that GA is inferior to Omniture because it is free persists despite the increasing difficulty documenting significant service level or qualitative differences.
However, prior to October of 2008, much of the perception of Omniture’s superior flexibility had to do with the ability of the marketer to modify data immediately and retroactively through multiple advanced segmentations. In Google’s October 2008 update, it offers all of this for free, obfuscating the differences between the two products.
Mobile Phone Analytics
While marketers debate “Google Analytics vs. Omniture”, the conversation about mobile phone analytics has taken a back seat. Mobile phones are not like Internet browsers. The methods used by Google Analytics and other web analytics packages don’t work properly on mobile phones. The need for free iPhone and Android analytics is increasing as mobile web access does. Marketers often make the erroneous assumption that Google Analytics and Omniture report cell phone data adequately. Companies like Flurry Mobile Analytics provide a high quality, free service comparable to Google Analytics.
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