[LINK] free phone antivirus software

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

As Phones Do More, They Become Targets of Hacking 

By BRAD STONE nytimes.com Published: December 20, 2009

(also: http://blog.mylookout.com)
 
SAN FRANCISCO — Mobile phones are becoming ever more like personal 
computers. That means they are also becoming more vulnerable to 
traditional computer menaces like hackers and viruses.

This year, the Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Lab reported on a new 
malicious program that stole money by taking over Nokia phones and making 
small charges to the owners’ wireless accounts.

Last month, an Australian student created an experimental worm that 
hopscotched across “jailbroken” iPhones, which are phones altered to run 
software Apple has not authorized. The mischievous worm did not cause any 
damage; it just installed a photo of the ’80s pop star Rick Astley. But 
to security experts, it suggested that pernicious attacks on iPhones are 
possible.

Where there are perceived security threats, there are always 
entrepreneurs and investors looking to capitalize on them — and build 
profitable businesses. 

This month Khosla Ventures, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital 
firm, led an investment group that injected $5.5 million into a fledgling 
security start-up called Lookout. 

Lookout, based in San Francisco, was previously a consulting firm called 
Flexilis run by recent graduates of the University of Southern 
California. Now it wants to be the security giant of the mobile world, 
similar to the role Symantec plays in the PC market.

This year, Lookout began testing security software for phones running the 
Windows Mobile and Android operating systems, and it will soon introduce 
security applications for the BlackBerry and iPhone. 

The software protects phones against rogue programs and gives phone 
owners the ability to remotely back up and erase the data on their 
phones. 

It also lets them track the location of their handset on the Web.

A basic version of the software is free, while the company plans to 
charge a monthly subscription for a version with more features.

“It feels a lot like it did in 1999 in desktop security,” said John 
Hering, Lookout’s 26-year-old chief executive, who for years has done 
research demonstrating security vulnerabilities in phones. 

“People are using the mobile Web and downloading applications more than 
ever before, and there are threats that come with that.”

Lookout represents the latest attempt to build a new business that 
capitalizes on the surge of smartphones. Thousands of companies making 
mobile games, shopping tools and other programs have sprung up in the 
last two years as the iPhone in particular has taken off. Lookout and its 
investors believe this is the right time to get into the market.

“The rules of mobile are different,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla 
Ventures, which also recently invested in Square, a mobile payments start-
up. 

“This is people’s most personal computer, and it needs to be protected.”

Companies like Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and Good 
Technology, a Silicon Valley-based mobile messaging firm, already offer 
mobile security tools, but their systems are aimed at businesses. 

Security firms like Symantec also have mobile security divisions, and a 
five-year-old company, Trust Digital, based in McLean, Va., has set its 
sights on this market. 

Lookout says it can address the unique challenges of protecting 
cellphones, like preserving battery life. While the company will not give 
details, it says it has figured out how to get its software to work on 
the iPhone, which does not allow non-Apple programs to operate in the 
background, as security software typically does.

Mr. Hering and his co-founder, Kevin Mahaffey, 25, have been publicly 
demonstrating the weaknesses of mobile phones for some time. In 2005, 
they camped outside the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood and scanned 
the phones of stars walking the red carpet, using a short-range Bluetooth 
wireless connection. They found that as many as 100 of the phones were 
vulnerable to hacking over such a connection.

That year, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, they hacked 
into a phone over a mile away using Bluetooth. 

Lookout’s founders and backers concede that for now, snoops and bad guys 
pose much less of a threat to cellphones than to PCs. But they believe 
there is an immediate need for software that preserves and protects a 
phone’s data, from e-mail to corporate information, and they say current 
systems do not work when a family or business has multiple types of 
cellphones on various wireless networks. 

For instance, a small business could install the Lookout software on many 
different types of devices, back up all the data and remotely erase a 
phone if, say, an employee leaves it in a cab.

Jeff Moss, a security expert and organizer of the Black Hat conference, 
said mobile security had historically “been a solution in search of a 
problem.” But he said mobile viruses had recently become more common in 
Asia. His own Nokia N97 phone even caught a bug recently, though software 
he was running from F-Secure, a Finnish security company, caught it in 
time.

“The tipping point will be when we’re using the phone to shop and conduct 
banking,” Mr. Moss said. “The more you do with the phone, the more 
valuable a target it becomes.”
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Cheers,
Stephen