Anti-Virus for Phones - Worth It?

[sparkeh]

Non-jailbroken iPhones and Windows Phones do not get viruses, so your question only really applies to Android smartphones.

Um, the article you quoted states that there could be viruses for Windows Phones:

even with its restrictions, there is the possibility that the platform does attract viruses. Some of these might even use music and image files to propagate. AVG putting the infrastructure in place to scan these files is not entirely unreasonable.

On my Android phone I use Lookout which appears to do a good job.

[Arthur]

Um, the article you quoted states that there could be viruses for Windows Phones

The first is that Windows Phone simply doesn't have any viruses to scan for. Second, Windows Phone applications are sandboxed; they have no access to the system files or other applications. Even if a virus were to be developed for the platform, the virus scanner would not be able to detect or remove it.

[sparkeh]

@Arthur
Ok we could trade carefully selected quoted all day, but the article contradicts itself.
If a Windows phone can store files that have malware then people are putting a lot of trust in MS to not have left any vulnerabilities in things like the image viewer or browser right?

Anyway, I see AV software as more than just protecting yourself, if I did have some file with malware on my phone I would see it as my duty not to pass it on.

[aerospacemango]

@Arthur
Ok we could trade carefully selected quoted all day, but the article contradicts itself.
If a Windows phone can store files that have malware then people are putting a lot of trust in MS to not have left any vulnerabilities in things like the image viewer or browser right?

Anyway, I see AV software as more than just protecting yourself, if I did have some file with malware on my phone I would see it as my duty not to pass it on.

Well said, that man!

If only everyone had that attitude, instead of the laissez-faire attitude that "It doesn't affect my phone, and probably never will, so i don't need anything!"

This same problem affects people with Macs too!

(By Macs, I don't mean long coats! Just thought I'd make that clear!)

[Geoff]

Indeed. All my Linux boxes that handle files that end up on Windows clients do AV scans on said files. This is usually email, samba shares, ftp and web. So quite a lot of avenues causing a Linux server to be an unwitting distributor of windows malware.