Anti-viruses for the Palm

The PC platform has been (pardon the pun) plagued with many viruses since the DOS and Windows 9x eras. Other operating systems (OSs) including Unix/Linux and Win NT have been less vulnerable. The Palm OS was also one such unaffected platform till very recently. 

A new breed of viruses has emerged that specifically targets the Palm OS and destroys data in it. Although very few in number, these viruses do have the potential to wipe out months of work without any warning. 

The first one developed was called Palm_Phage. Appearing in November 2000, this worked as any traditional virus, by spreading from an infected application to non-infected ones. The next one was technically not a virus, but a Trojan. A Trojan is a program that pretends to do one thing, while actually does something else in the background without your knowledge. The Palm_Liberty Trojan pretended to be a crack for the shareware game for the Palm–Liberty. On running this program, it would delete all programs and data from the Palm. Interestingly, the developer of Liberty created this Trojan to dissuade users from trying to crack the program.

Thankfully a few anti-virus applications for the Palm are available. Here we’ll take a look at three of these–F-Secure, InoculateIt, and PC-Cillin. There are a few differences in using them from their desktop cousins. However, do keep in mind that I was not able to find a Palm virus, so I couldn’t test the effectiveness of these anti-viruses. Even if I had found one, I wouldn’t have installed it on my Palm. Since these viruses are fairly new, I wouldn’t have risked losing important data.

F-Secure

F-Secure is a free product from www.f-secure.com. It scans only for the Palm_Phage virus. Although a very simple interface that just has a ‘Scan now’ button does the job, the scan takes ages to complete as compared to other scanners. The application itself is only 5 kB in size.