Earlier this year, F-Secure announced that its F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus will be available through Nokia to the users of four mobile devices based on S60 3rd Edition - Nokia N71, Nokia E60, Nokia E61 and Nokia E70. In the same timeframe it also announced a mobile product line extension to its F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus family, which now provides support for the new Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system.
Cooperation with the larger phone manufacturers to ensure that their customers are safe from mobile malware is nothing new for F-Secure but with the latest phones, this aspect of mobile communication is becoming increasingly important. The most up to date phones are effectively intelligent multimedia centers to be used both for work and leisure and have therefore become a potentially tempting target for attacks.
F-Secure and Nokia, for example, have been cooperating in the area of increasing content security for years and have jointly developed distribution models for antivirus solutions. From 2004 onwards, F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus clients have already earlier been available through Nokia to the users of select Nokia's smartphone models. In addition to this, F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus clients have also been included into some operator variants of Nokia's mobile devices.
For the Nokia N71 - the company's present flagship device, F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus will be distributed on the memory card in the standard device sales package, while for the Nokia Eseries devices, the antivirus client will be available at the Nokia Catalogs service.
The S60 platform, built on Symbian OS, is the leading smartphone software in the world and it is licensed by some of the foremost mobile phone manufacturers in the market. The flexibility of the S60 platform allows for various hardware designs and software configurations. This is demonstrated through the multitude of S60 devices already available on the market
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As well as offering Mobile Anti-Virus for Symbian OS, F-Secure also supports Windows. In the same time frame as its announcement with Nokia, F-Secure also launched a platform extension to the already existing F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus for Windows Mobile 2003 version up to 5.0. As a result, F-Secure can now offer support for all Windows Mobile platforms, both 2003 and 5.0, both Pocket PC and Smartphone. Examples of Pocket PC devices using Windows Mobile 5.0 are QTek9000, QTek9100 and MDA Pro. Examples of Smartphone devices using Windows Mobile 5.0 are QTek8300 and QTek8310.
As is the case for both Nokia and Windows, F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus provides real-time, on-device protection against harmful content with automatic over-the-air antivirus updates and is the world's first and most widely available mobile operator antivirus service.
Antti Vihavainen, Vice President, Mobile Security, F-Secure pointed out that the widespread appeal of both Symbian 60 and Windows in the latest smartphones made them both easy targets for burgeoning mobile malware authors. More than anything else, Vihavainen emphasised the easy discovery and activation of mobile anti-virus solutions for users to gain protection against mobile malware.
For a 30-day trial client of F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus, click here
Author: Mark Woods, Corporate Communicator
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