Palm virus taken in hand by anti-virus specialists

The virus was discovered by NAI's anti-virus emergency response team and has not been seen in the wild.

Unlike last month's Liberty Emulators Trojan, the company claims the PalmOS/Phage virus is destructive and will delete files on Palm PDAs. NAI said the Liberty emulator was not capable of causing any lasting damage because the Trojan could not replicate itself.

Speaking to silicon.com, Jack Clark, European Product Manager at NAI said: "In the past we had examples of Trojans but this is the first virus written for PalmOS. The virus's task is to self replicate and it goes on replicating itself and infecting other applications and possibly other Palms."

Rival anti-virus vendor Sophos said NAI is hyping the issue and that catching the Phage virus is extremely unlikely.

Graham Cluley, technical consultant at Sophos, said: "The virus is very obvious and it is hard to imagine how it will spread, as users will have to manually forward the virus to each other from Palm to Palm. It's not as effective as an email-aware virus like Melissa or the Love Bug."

Cluley added: "If I were a system administrator I wouldn't be losing any sleep over this one. However, we might have to issue an update for Sophos Anti-Virus because of media interest caused by NAI's press release."