iphone virus

iphone virus.

Is there actually an iPhone virus? Well, that depends upon exactly what you mean by a virus. Certainly there has already been an iPhone Trojan, in fact it's been around for about 18 months.

So if you think that a trojan is a virus then yes, there is already an iPhone virus. The point to note about that iPhone virus though is that it only works on phones that have been "jailbroken", that is, without Apple's permission, adjusted so that third party software can be loaded. So if you haven't jailbroken your iPhone, you don't need to fear that particular virus.

However, there are two other points to note about the vulnerabilities of the iPhone. The first is described here and is a design flaw. There's a serious memory corruption bug in the way the iPhone handles SMS messages and this can be exploited, by sending a specific SMS message, to take control of the phone.

The second point is much more important though than just this one proven breach in the security of the iPhone.It is that iPhones and even Macs are not as resistant to viruses and trojans as many think. The reason there are so few at present is that Macs have never been more than a very small segment of the market. For anyone writing virii for a living (which of course many are) machines running Windows are a much more attractive target for here are many times more of them.

So the reason Macs don't get attacked is not because they cannot be attacked, it is because people aren't bothering because there are so few of them. However, this is now changing with the success of the iPhone. It uses essentially the same operating system as a Mac and there are many more cell phones out there than there are computers. With many more potential targets perhaps it will become worth it for virus and trojan writers to attack the Apple O/S. And if it's true that they are inherently no safer than Windows, then they'll at times be successful.

All of which might turn out to be slightly ironic. The success of the iPhone will lead to more virii being written for Apple machines: which will remove one of the reasons people do buy Macs, that they don't get attacked by virii.