How to Use Antivirus Software?

I've covered generic approaches to protect your phone and recover from an attack. But those approaches do not always prevent all attacks. Manually resetting the phone is time consuming and does not reverse the financial loss you might have incurred from the virus.

If you are really concerned about mobile viruses, you can invest in antivirus software to protect your phone. Antivirus programs for Symbian-based phones (e.g., the Nokia Series 60 smartphones) are available from the following vendors:

• F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus from http://www.f-secure.com/products/fsmavs60/
• SimWorks Anti-Virus from http://www.simworks.biz/sav/
• Symantec Mobile Security for Symbian (beta) from https://www-secure.symantec.com/public_beta/

Like antivirus software on computers, mobile antivirus software scans all files on your device to look for specific patterns of known viruses (a.k.a. the virus signature). If it finds one, it isolates the infected file and presents you with the option to remove it.

The full device scan takes a long time and consumes a lot of battery power, so don't perform a full scan on a regular basis. To save time and energy, the antivirus programs support incremental scan modes that check only incoming files, such as files you've downloaded or created using software on your phone. After the first full device scan, the antivirus programs run in the background and automatically scan all incoming files from the Web, Bluetooth, MMS, and email messages, and check for virus signatures as they arrive. If they detect an infected program, you will be advised not to install it.

As you would expect, the key for a successful antivirus program is to have a complete list of virus signatures to check against. This is a moving target, since new viruses might be written after the antivirus software is released. So, all mobile antivirus programs come with a subscription service that allows the program to update its virus signature database periodically over the Internet via the phone's data connection.