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Malware afflicts 1.5% of Symbian handsets

A survey carried out by SMobile, creators of mobile-security software, reports that 1 in 63 Symbian handsets is infected with some sort of malware - though things might not be quite as bad as they seem. The survey sampled 1958 Symbian devices in India and Europe, and discovered that 1.6 per cent of them were infected with either …

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brendand

Dubious

So the device polled were ones that had AV software installed on them? That's a bit like polling a doctors office to find swine flu infection rates, if you know what I mean.

Anonymous Coward
Pirate

Symbian users are happy to download warez

There are lots of people downloading cracked Symbian software, therefore, the 1.5 % figure seems a bit low to me. Given that so few of them are infected, Symbian Signed seems to work to the extent that virus writers are not targeting the platform.

Thad
Coat

A bit old?

"Smobile also told us that the 1958 devices sampled had all downloaded its Security Shield software..."

Rubbish. It was "Press Button A" in those days; long, long before the first car phone preceded the first mobile

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

9 out of 10 cat owners

perhaps its like the cat food ads where the key addition to the "9 out of 10 cat owners" statement is the rider "who expressed a preferrence". Perhaps here its 1.6% of Symbian owners "who used a free malware scanner" had malware ... this would be skewed by the fact that the sample set would clearly be skewed towards a class of people who already thought they might have malware.

Craig 8
Thumb Down

"Study" lacking grasp of statistics, scruples

See http://secblog.symbian.org/2009/07/31/mobile-malware-study-not-news/ for a rebuttal.

Anonymous Coward
Linux

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