F-Secure Protects Against First Palm Virus

F-Secure ships Palm anti-virus program only hours after first virus was found

Espoo, Finland - September 22, 2000

F-Secure Corporation announced today the immediate availability of protection against the first Palm virus, PalmOS/Phage.963.

Unlike the Palm Liberty trojan, which was found less than a month ago, PalmOS/Phage is a real virus and is capable of spreading from one Palm application to another. It can also spread from one Palm to another if infected files are shared via infrared beaming or installed via a docking station.

"As the first real virus on any PDA platform, this is an important milestone in computer virus history", comments Mikko Hypponen, Manager of Anti-Virus Research at F-Secure Corporation. "However, the virus in itself does not pose a big threat to end users. F-Secure has received no reports of real-world infections at this time."

When the virus is transferred to a Palm and executed, the screen goes blank for a second and the program exits without doing anything visible. During this time the virus locates and infects all other programs in the system. After this, all applications on the system repeat the same behaviour when executed. To restore an infected Palm back to normal operation, all applications will have to be deleted and reinstalled or restored from a backup.

Only hours after the virus was found, F-Secure finished the first version of F-Secure Anti-Virus for Palm - a protection program which runs on the Palm PDA itself. This utility will shortly be available for free download at http://www.F-Secure.com

In addition, F-Secure Anti-Virus v5.0 for Windows detects and disinfects this virus during synchronization operations, using the latest update available from http://www.F-Secure.com.

A technical description of the virus as well as screen shots are available from the F-Secure virus description database at: http://www.F-Secure.com/v-descs/phage.shtml