Windows Phone 7: AVG Antivirus is a "virus"... :?

[Anakha56]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2 ... mpaign=rss

Privacy-violating, useless AVG antivirus app pulled from Windows Phone Marketplace
By Peter Bright | Published about 2 hours ago

To the surprise of many, an antivirus application was published on the Windows Phone Marketplace earlier in the week. The publication of AVG Mobilation for Windows Phone was peculiar for two main reasons. The first is that Windows Phone simply doesn't have any viruses to scan for. Second, Windows Phone applications are sandboxed; they have no access to the system files or other applications. Even if a virus were to be developed for the platform, the virus scanner would not be able to detect or remove it.

AVG was apparently undaunted by these obstacles, and developed the free, but ad-supported, Mobilation regardless. Though Windows Phone gives applications no ability to access most files on the system, there are some exceptions. Third-party software can access photos and music stored on the device, and so, for lack of anything better to scan, this is what Mobilation examines.

Or at least, what it pretends to examine. Analysis by Rafael Rivera suggested that it was not even particularly thorough in the scanning it did perform: it checked the names of the files it scanned and if they matched the string "eicar" or "עברית" it flagged them as "suspicious". "eicar" is a reference to the EICAR file used to test anti-virus software. "עברית" is Hebrew written in Hebrew. Its significance is not obvious.

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Right... So it steals your private data and scans useless files, sounds like one of those fake virus you get from the web...

[Ron2K]

I'd be very surprised if this was something actually made by AVG themselves. Sounds like fake antivirus malware to me.

[Anakha56]

Read the full article . AVG did make it and distribute it. Lovely guy steals your personal data and AVG refuse to say what they plan to do with said data...

[hamin_aus]

Who even uses Windows phones

[Monty]

Who even uses Windows phones

There are windows phones?