Growing threat

Richard Hales, UK manager for F-Secure, said that although many mobile operators had software in their networks to stop viruses propagating, more protection was needed to stop the bugs jumping from phone to phone.

"Handset to handset is a good way to deliver a virus," said Mr Hales.

In recent months, more viruses for mobile phones and variants of old ones have started to appear.

Mobile viruses such as Cabir and Commwarrior can spread via the Bluetooth short range radio system found on many smart phones. Commwarrior can also spread via multimedia messaging systems.

Most of the mobile phone viruses target handsets that use the Symbian operating system. Infection can be avoided by turning off Bluetooth on smart phones.

Mr Hales said that currently only about 10% of handsets were so-called smartphones that can fall victim to these viruses. However, he said, the numbers of smartphones was going to inevitably rise making more and more people vulnerable to infection.

Outbreaks at the Live8 concert in Germany and the World Championships athletics meeting in Helsinki showed how the malicious programs can propagate when large numbers of people gather.

Prior to these outbreaks in the wild, many played down the threat of mobile viruses because a lot of them only existed in the laboratory.

Handsets were increasingly becoming stores of personal data that people are loathed to lose, said Mr Hales. Protecting this important data was going to become key as mobile viruses climb.

While many security firms produce add-on software utilities to protect handsets, F-Secure is thought to be the first to sell such a program to the mass market.

You can also check : Top News News of the Week

F-Secure said that its boxed anti-virus software for mobiles will be in the shops and online from 5 September.