As more people switch from traditional cell phones to smart phones, worries have increased that users will fall prey to the same virus and malware problems that can plague personal computers.
In fact, industry experts say they're managing to keep ahead of that threat.
What they are more worried about is a simpler issue: identity theft when a phone is lost or stolen.
With the iPhone and other smart phones, a few taps or clicks can access e-mail accounts, check bank balances, update a Facebook profile and call up calendars and photos.
"What's really going on today is fraudsters and cybercriminals are looking to steal data," said Peter Beardmore, director of product marketing at security company Kaspersky Lab. "A mobile phone is not a good candidate for a botnet like you have in the PC world, where it can enslave your computer and let it do work to send spam or whatever. But (a mobile phone) is a great candidate to steal user data from."
In one of the most recent high-profile cases of a lost smart phone, a young Apple employee left a prototype of the next-generation iPhone on a Redwood City, Calif., barstool in March. The company remotely wiped the phone by the next morning, but not before the patron who found the abandoned device identified its owner by looking at his Facebook page, which was on the phone's display.
Although concerns about mobile malware and viruses have circulated in industry circles for years, there have been few reports of real threats to consumers.
That's in part because infection is a numbers game, meaning perpetrators go after devices in mass quantities, and there are far more PCs in circulation than smart phones.
Wireless carriers in the U.S. also catch some threats, such as spam text messages, before they reach consumers.
"What we've been able to do is learn a lot from the PC experience, and we have put some different technical programs into place that have done a very good job of blocking viruses and spam messages," said John Walls, vice president of public affairs at industry group CTIA-The Wireless Association.
Because viruses and malware remain a distant threat to mobile phones, security companies are concentrating their efforts on preventing old-fashioned loss and theft.
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