Symbian to F-Secure: STFU

A Symbian exec has done an interview with Silicon.com (via All About Symbian), taking the air out of the ongoing mobile virus FUD that's starting at F-Secure headquarters in Finland and being picked up by a largely ignorant and easily excitable media. Symbian's EVP for research, David Wood, points out what most of us have known for a while: that the chances of being infected by a mobile virus are small, and infection still requires the suspension of common sense to install the malicious program.

Understandably, he doesn't call out the company by name, but the message is pretty clear: F-Secure needs to chill out with its hype -- after all, they're hardly an unbiased source. What's interesting though, is that Symbian appears to have realized the damage that F-Secure's self-serving press releases can do to its brand, since the viruses whose spread the company is touting are thus far limited to the Symbian OS. It does Symbian no benefit at all for there to be real security problems with its OS -- if there really was a problem, you'd have to think they'd be proactively pushing out a fix, rather than saying that there really is nothing to worry about.

Update: F-Secure gets called out here, too, by an operator, a customer-support company and even another anti-virus firm. The company, predictably, defends itself by saying it's "pushing the issue now to avoid ever reaching the problem we have with malware on PCs, which is out of control." Which, of course, they hate, since if malware on PCs disappeared, nobody would need to buy their software.