Walking around this year's Smartphone Show in London this week, one thought suddenly struck me - where were the 'anti-virus' vendors? In 2006, I had great fun walking up to their stands and asking either 'So er.... how many viruses have you discovered so far for S60 3rd Edition or UIQ 3' or 'OK, I'm Joe Public and everything's turned on - go on, infect me'. This year, no such fun or frolics...
Regular readers here will remember that I've been campaigning for years that Symbian OS smartphones are inherently safe from malware. Older S60 devices had a few 'viruses' targetted at them but even these required explicit acceptance with multiple 'Yes' keypresses by each user before anything could be installed. In a few countries where software ethics are, shall we say, more flexible, a few minor outbreaks occurred, with (mainly young) people trying out 'free' applications that they'd been beamed and happily agreeing to everything. But there were no, repeat no major outbreaks, despite scare story after scare story from at least five different anti-virus developers, each with a huge vested interest in keeping the scare stories running.
And then came Symbian OS 9 - a break in application compatibility for users, which was a pain, but a quantum leap in overall security that meant that any application that hadn't been thoroughly checked wasn't allowed invisible access to dangerous features within the phone (e.g. Bluetooth/email). Bingo. In one fell swoop, true viruses that could damage and replicate were rendered not just rare and unlikely, but 99.99% impossible.
The absolute worst case scenario under Symbian OS 9 (that means S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 to you and I) is that someone might make up a so-called 'trojan', a malicious program pretending to be something it isn't, such as a cracked game or commercial application. But even here, once installed (after the usual installation prompts) any dangerous activity (such as wanting to send a message by Bluetooth, SMS, MMS or email) would need the user to manually approve each and every attempt. Even the most clueless user in the world would surely work out that the new application was a trojan after having to spend his or her entire time approving breakout attempts?
So, at the Smartphone Show in 2006 we had various anti-virus/security firms peddling their wares and hanging on, under challenges, by virtue of there still being lots of new S60 2nd Edition devices being sold and by saying that 'hey, it's best to play safe'. But S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3 have now been out for at least 18 months in the real world and have been selling in large numbers. And there's not a single instance of a virus. Not one. because the OS makes such existence impossible.
Which brings me back to my observation about the 2007 show and the extremely low profile of third party security software. I'm guessing that even the hype merchants at the likes of F-Secure couldn't stand up at a stall and, with their hand on their hearts, say that users needed anti-virus software protection.
Anti-virus applications still exist for Symbian OS 9, for political reasons, but tend to be included in 'not installed' form. As with the bloated monster that's the Norton utility suite on the Windows desktop and which causes more problems than it solves, installing a so-called 'anti-virus' utility on a Symbian OS 9-powered smartphone is just a big waste of battery power, of RAM and of processor time. And don't even bother asking about firewalls, as test after test has shown that Symbian OS's Internet ports have always been 100% secure from random probes.
Tempting it is to claim any credit for the disappearance of mobile malware hype, the main credit has, of course, to go to Symbian for enforcing OS 9's Platform Security in the first place. Not every mobile world technology initiative gets proved 100% right, but 'PlatSec' was, for me, right on the nail and came at just the right time.
Steve Litchfield, AllAboutSymbian, 18th October 2007