Linked by David Adams on Fri 12th Sep 2008 16:39 UTC, submitted by Dannys
The opening up of the mobile industry is great news for application developers but not so good for IT security professionals, according to experts. For example, Symbian, the single most widely used mobile software platform, has already wrestled with the dangers of openness to third-party developers, said Khoi Nguyen, group product manager in mobile security at Symantec. Symbian 7 and 8 were fairly open and allowed almost any application to be installed and run. This led to a few hundred viruses being introduced within a couple of years, so Symbian 9 was locked down significantly, he said.
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Member since:
2006-03-13
The shift towards total lockdown in the Symbian platform had very little to do with the appearances of virus and spyware. Rather it had to do with the fact that the various phone makers using Symbian really wanted a way to bring out phones with MUCH more sophisticated media and graphics features that previously and didn't want to allow FOSS (and other small-time) developers to have access to those new features. Or at least that's how Nokia's Series 60 phones have used it.