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Is your PDA at risk from malignant code?

Alfred Poor AnchorDesk

Published: 25 Apr 2001 14:51 BST

But our PDAs?

Last Autumn, we discovered that even PDAs are at risk. That's when the first Palm OS Trojan Horse (Liberty Crack) and viruses (Phage and Vapor) were revealed. To date, I'm not aware of any report of viruses for the Pocket PC, but that does not mean that viruses aren't out there -- or on the way.

So let's agree that there is a credible threat from PDA viruses. That still leaves us with one important question: How much is your PDA at risk from malignant code? It may help to divide this question into two parts: What do you stand to lose, and how will you lose it?

Before PDAs, people lugged giant Filofax personal organizers around at work and at home (and some still do). The big difference between a Filofax and a PDA is that if you lose your PDA data -- or even the PDA itself -- you can just resync from your desktop computer and all your data is restored. Lose your Filofax, and unless you've been photocopying all the pages every night, you're cooked.

So you actually gain one form of protection simply by the nature of the data that you store on your PDA. It is automatically backed up every time you sync with your desktop. As long as we continue to view PDAs as receptacles for data that is duplicated on a desktop, any loss from a virus attack will likely be limited to changes made since the last sync session. The processors and operating systems in PDAs are so different from desktops that it is unlikely -- if not impossible -- for a single virus to do damage to your data on both platforms at the same time. So your data is probably safe, even if you do nothing.

Note, however, that if we start using PDAs as the sole repository for new work and data, then all bets are off. The cost of losing data to a virus attack increases rapidly.