All of us have probably experienced different forms of viruses and worms on our computer.

With that of course comes the slow computers, the Internet misconnections and the lengthy amount of time you spend on scanning and downloading tools to help you remove these problems.

Well, if you think that viruses will be on you computer only, you my friend are naive. It has been predicted that in 2006 viruses will soon jump to mobile products like cell phones, and PDAs.

This isn’t news. But what could viruses do? Could our personal information be at risk?

Well, I thought about it and the future looks very grim. Let’s take for example mobile phones.

How would we get them?

One could receive a virus from a text message, a photo, or a video that has been sent. This mimics the same way one would receive a virus on their computer.

And what if that cellphone becomes corrupted? Imagine that as you make phone calls to your friends, text, image, or video message something that you begin to unknowingly give viruses to your friends.

Or what about if the virus scans you contact list and instantly sends all those people a corrupted text message. Now imagine that this chain of events occurs thousands of times over.

You could receive a virus through a Palm for example when your friend beams you corrupted software.

I believe that the cell phone, though, would be perfect for virus proliferation.

Similar to the Internet, users are connected and they can communicate with each other.

While the threat remains for PDAs (downloading software from your home computer or sharing programs) the network is more limited.

What Could They Do?

The viruses could watch your phone activity, online activity (i.e. it acts like spyware).

They could slow down communication between the phone and the satellite taking it forever to phone someone or send messages to your friends.

Even worse it could garble the communication between your phone and satellites, basically rendering your phone useless.

It could even disable parts of your phone.

Why This Isn’t Far Fetched

Firstly, I never came up with the idea that viruses will spread to mobile products. Experts have said that this is, and soon will be, a reality.

However, all the scenarios that I have brought out are really almost everything that viruses have done to our home computers.

In other words mobile products are just another platform, but the goal of hackers and virus creators will still remain the same: to corrupt, destroy, or get information from these devices.

What Does This All Mean?

Right now there is no reason to panic. But imagine that someone just sent out a virus. Cell phones are not equipped with antivirus services. How would they react to such a threat?

There are antivirus programs for PDAs.

Would they have to begin creating antivirus programs that scan messages? Would companies charge you for these? And which company would provide the best antivirus service(s)

As you can see there are many questions that are left unanswered. We will have to see how these threats are dealt with once the first breach occurs.

Get prepared for the next wave.