Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Are there viruses for Palm with Palm OS?

A very frequent doubt of the holders of a Palm is whether there are viruses for PalmOS. The answer is yes, although they are almost testimonials, most simple proof of concept (similar to what happens from now on Linux). Here are some examples:

  • There is a trojan called Sierpinski Triangle, so called because when you run this draws fractal, while in the background is dedicated a. .. erase our information!

Si llegas a ver esto, olvídate de tus datos
If you do this, forget about your data

This Trojan has been programmed by an anonymous user without a priori "bad intentions". Motivated by the emergence of a press release in which he revealed the birth of a new virus for PocketPC, has decided to highlight security holes in operating systems and mobile that can lead to total loss of data in memory almecenados .

The trojan is hidden in a fully functional application that plays a beautiful fractal known as the Sierpinski triangle, the dark side is that while we enjoy this beautiful fractal in the background is erasing all databases within the Palm.

  • Another Trojan is benign little Liberty, which is just pretending to be a crack Game Boy emulator of the same name. The file is usually called "liberty_1_1_crack.prc" and the title once it is installed "Crack 1.1." This is a trojan, like the previous one because it has no ability to replicate or run only. When the user runs it, try to erase all the files on the Palm, and then restarted.

El crack instalado y listo para borrar nuestros archivos
The crack is installed and ready to erase our files

  • Shortly after the onset of Liberty, the first virus appeared in all rules, called Dubber Phage or PalmOS/Phage.936. It did have potential to infect files. The good news is that it did not produce any damage to equipment or deleted data, and is easy to remove. However, it opened the way for future development of destructive virus for PalmOS.

To be transferred to a Palm handheld computer and executed, the virus causes the screen goes off for a few moments and that the program is closed. In those moments, and locating the virus is infecting other programs installed on your system. Then, all applications repeat the same procedure to be executed. To return to normality will be necessary to remove and reinstall all applications.

Security against such threats is based on the same principles as that of PCs: do not ever install programs of dubious provenance. To assist us things always count on the PalmOS emulator program where we can test the suspect and see how it behaves.

However, there are also anti-virus designed to operate on a team with PalmOS. For example there is an F-Secure and Symantec. However, for those who do not want to have a program on your Palm consume more RAM, there is the possibility of simply scanning in advance with the PC's antivirus files to be installed by Hotsync, as recommended by Symantec. Of course it will not be well protected from the threats that we can directly download from the Internet on our Palm, or any other means.

In short, viruses for Palm OS does exist, but are not a big threat. But we must take them into account, and not blithely install everything that we are on the Internet, but have a little caution and common sense.


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