CA and F-Secure are squaring up over a disagreement about the significance of mobile viruses. CA, a company that does not produce anti-virus software for mobile phones, claims that F-Secure, a company that produces anti-virus software for mobile phones, is hyping the threat to create a market.
CA is not claiming that mobile viruses don’t exist, but that the threat they represent is “theoretical”. "Dig below the skin and the message stops sounding pithy and starts smelling rather rotten. At the core of the rot is the mostly undeniable fact that there is no threat to protect against," said Simon Perry, European vice president of security for CA. CA cites the lack of economic incentive for developers, the lack of interoperability between platforms and phone models and the requirement for user interaction as barriers.
The early PC virus writers had no economic motivation, and numerous email worms have demonstrated users willingness to click on almost anything. The lack of interoperability has been a limitation, but malware authors have created cross-platform code in the past.