It would appear that virus checking on handsets is of necessity a growth industry. Webroot's come up with an interesting approach here.
My recent posting on what to do about malware on handsets and similar devices suggested a number of alternatives, none of which are perfect. Putting a solid stake in the ground here is security software leader Webroot, perhaps best known for their anti-spyware tools, who yesterday announced their solution for Android-based devices, Webroot Mobile Security for Android, which is apparently where attention needs to be focused, at least in the near term. While I personally can’t wait to see if Apple’s we’ll-tell-you-what’s-good strategy (which, BTW, does not include reading source code) will really increase security and integrity over the long term, the rise of OS-based handsets regardless brings with it a variant on the security and integrity challenges that PC users everywhere must deal with on essentially a daily basis.
While it was my hope that such could be avoided on smartphones (what I call platform phones, those based on an OS that can run third-party apps), they are, after all, little PCs, so welcome to the real world. Webroot’s approach is pretty much the same as contemporary PC-based anti-virus software (subscription renewals and all), but, just like all the big PC virus guys, they’ve added a whole bunch of useful extensions. These include remote lock, remote wipe, device-location notification, blocking unwanted calls and texts, and an interesting feature that shows which apps have access to personal information. It’s simple, inexpensive ($14.99 per device per year, and there’s a free if less functional version also available), and easy to use.
Personally, I’d like to see this product be a bit more Web-based, and some functionality is enabled via text messages, which opens the door to yet another and quite-irritating attack vector. But most users will find this product an easy if traditional approach to malware mitigation, with a few other nice features as well. Not bad, then, for release 1.0.
