March 4, 2010. FatSkunk co-founder Dr. Markus Jakobsson speaks about mobile malware and FatSkunk’s solution to the problem at the annual RSA Conference. (Click for MIT Technology Review article or watch the recording of the RSA presentation.)

For now the threat remains academic, says Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer for F-Secure Corporation, a security company based in Helsinki, Finland. There are only a few hundred known pieces of mobile malware, compared to millions for PCs. So far, he says, mobile malware has been rudimentary, and has not employed the sophisticated evasion schemes commonly used on desktop computers.

Hyppönen … believes that mobile malware will become more sophisticated in the future. At that point, he says, we’ll need clever detection schemes such as Jakobsson’s.