Re:The Deal That Makes No Sense
by 300bps on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @07:23AM
(#6320261)
Just for a funny anecdote, an Android user at.my work asked me what virus scanning software I used on my Windows Phone 8. I laughed because I thought he was making fun of Windows Phone. Turned out he was serious - his Galaxy had gotten two different viruses and he was running virus scan on it. I told him that ironically Microsoft's market share wasn't high enough for malware authors to target.
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And Android is complicated enough that it doesn't feel secure when it gets bloated. It is easy for someone used to windows to imagine that slowness or crashing are caused by a virus.
The person that asked me the question was a very experienced Android user that legitimately got two viruses on their phone that were causing link hijacking and popup advertisements.
He just assumed that Windows Phone would have the same virus issues as Android.
Re:The Deal That Makes No Sense
by georgemcbay on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @01:53PM
(#6322485)
Somewhat ironically (compared to the Windows desktop situation), the only people I know who have actually gotten virus-like infections on Android are people advanced enough to be running custom rooted 3rd party roms on their devices.
This isn't to say it can't or hasn't happened on phones running factory stock roms, the Samsung /dev/exynos-mem permission bug on its own was one example of a huge attack vector on a limited set of Android phones, I just haven't seen or directly heard of it happening on a stock phone.