Can mobile phones get viruses?

Question

I was just wondering because mine's gone all weird of a sudden. Is there such a thing as a virus that is transmittable from phone to phone or is that the kind of thing that only happens in Stephen King stories?

Answer 1

Really Mobile phones which have EXTERNAL MEMORY STICK may affect with virus.... If you connect it by data cables with any computer which have virus.....Your mobile may get affect with virus....

I am not familiar about internal memory.....

Answer 2

Yes it sure can just like if you were sending someone a email that contain a virus. If it effect your phone and cannot do anything i think you need to reset. Here an example of mobile phone virus  

Answer 3

This is like asking "can biological organisms get AIDS?". The answer to both questions is - yes, but only some of them. :-)

The only kind of mobile phones that is seriously threatened by viruses are the phones that run the Symbian S60 R2 operating system. This is mostly the older models of Nokia's smart phones. Proof-of-concept viruses also exist for devices running the PalmOS, Windows Mobile and Symbian UIQ operating systems - but they have no chances of surviving in the wild. Also, there are no viruses for the phones that use the Symbian S60 R3 operating system (mostly - the newer models of Nokia's smart phones), since it is much more secure and is incompatible with the R2 version.

The vast majority of mobile phone models CANNOT be infected. The only kind of third-party programs you can install on them are usually Java (J2ME) midlets - and the Java security model makes the creation of a virus (or of an anti-virus program, or even a file manager, for that matter) impractical.

Since you didn't tell us which is your particular phone model, I can't tell you whether it can be infected or not. But "acting weird" usually means some kind of hardware failure.

There is another thing which one of the other answerer is confused about. If, when connected to a PC, the phone looks like an USB drive to it, and if the PC is infected with some particular kinds of viruses, the virus can copy itself to the phone. However, it will be inert there - it cannot run on the phone and cannot even infect another PC from it, since autoplay doesn't work for USB drives. So, technically, the phone is not infected, even though it contains a copy of the virus.