The Network Security. Org

By the time you read this, there could very well be 200 mobile viruses in the wild waiting to latch onto your company’s devices and wreak some major havoc. As of yesterday, the number of mobile-specific viruses teetered at 199 — and that figure is low, according to some — but mobile virus expert and F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen said it could reach 200 or more in a matter of days, minutes or seconds.

"We’re still at the very beginning," cautioned Hypponen, who is essentially the antivirus guru at F-Secure, a security software vendor based in Helsinki, Finland.

Hypponen compared the mobile virus arena today to that of viruses in the PC world in the 1980s. He said that right now mobile viruses are where PC viruses were in 1988. Comparatively, there are now roughly 165,000 identified PC-based viruses.

"If we [had] done some things differently … who knows what would’ve happened," he said, noting that mobile viruses could reach the prevalence of PC viruses within a few years. Virus onslaught sickens smartphones

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