Mobile viruses can spread in two ways

Mobile virus is an electronic virus...that targets mobile phones or wireless-enabled PDAs wireless phone and PDA networks become more numerous and more complex, it has become more difficult to secure them against electronic attacks in the form of viruses or other malicious software.

Mobile viruses can spread in two ways: through Bluetooth, or via a file sent as a multimedia message. "You have to have the right operating system; the viruses that will spread on the iPhone will not spread on Nokias, and vice versa," said Prof Barabasi.

"It turns out that the Bluetooth way, because it's driven by human mobility, is relatively slow. If you launch a Bluetooth virus it may take anywhere from days to months to spread, particularly if it's not a popular phone."


Mobile viruses have struck when lots of people gatherEventually users take infected phones to shops and replace or reset them, or change phones altogether, and the viruses spread no further.

"The real question is about MMS viruses. They're instantaneous: within two minutes everyone in your address book could have it; within a few hours everyone who is reachable would have it."

To discover the reason that this hasn't happened, the team turned to the network theory that was used in the 2008 work, making use of the data set that showed them the details of users' movement and social connections.

In the network theory, there is a phenomenon known as a "percolation transition".

In social networks, beyond the transition, everyone is connected to everyone. Applied to mobile viruses, the transition describes the point of no return: when everyone who could conceivably have a given virus will get it.

Up to now, viruses transmitted by MMS have spread sufficiently slowly that operators have had a chance to block them. The future scenario will be very different.

"Right now, we're under the percolation threshold. Only 5% of users have smartphones and even those are fragmented into different operating systems - the largest one doesn't even reach 3% of the overall market.

The first instance of a mobile virus occurred in June 2004 when it was discovered that a company called Ojam had engineered an anti-piracy Trojan virus in older versions of their mobile phone game Mosquito. This virus sent SMS text messages to the company without the user's knowledge. This virus was removed from more recent versions of the game; however it still exists on older, unlicensed versions. These older versions may still be distributed on file-sharing networks and free software download web sites.

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