A reason to NOT iPhone

I’m waiting for the first mass exploitation virus for the iPhone to arrive. With the iPhone ecosystem reaching critical mass, there can’t be much left in the way of roadblocks to prevent this. There has already been exploits that targeted ‘jail broken’ iPhones, more likely to have been created by Apple, or a fan of Apple DRM. Therefore the likelihood that a more potent virus will emerge is very high. The likely suspect, is one that exploits the ‘closed’ nature of the device, where the victim iPhone will show no indication of an infection.

Not that my chosen device is not subject to the same attacks, the Nokia N900 is also a target, but its just not as big a target as the iPhone. More or less the same argument that has been used to justify the lack of viruses on the Mac platform. I have a Mac also, and I feel safe, but not because it’s immune to viruses, it HAS been less targeted, and it has been ACTIVELY defended.

Apple virus scanning

This evening I installed ClamXav_1.1.1 into my MacBook and scanned my home directories. I was expecting nothing as I almost never download anything serious. But the scan did question several of my blog MySql backups which were lingering around in gzip formats, and one curious Java File ms03011.jar-3847f8dc-7fafd5ef, so I googled it, finding nothing, but abbreviating it down to ms03011.jar and found all sorts of hits, mostly with regards to ‘Adware’. The AV software had no recommendation, so I move the file(s) with that name from the library directory, and logged out and back in, and , it might be my imagination, the whole system seem to respond quicker. It could be nothing, but it didn’t hurt.