Resumen
This article reports on publicly disseminated malicious Palm applications. The first virus carrying the Palm program "Phage," was reported in September 2000, that infects applications installed on the handheld PC with copies of itself. The Trojan-horse Palm program "Liberty," reported in August 2000, deletes all applications on the handheld. Palm software is distributed as a serialized Palm resource (PRC) file of the application, stored on the user's local file server. When the handheld and the local file server are synchronized, PRC file is installed as an executable on the handheld. A Palm virus spread in this way will have limited success: following initial infection, subsequent spread to other programs is generally limited to the handheld. The paradigm of synchronizing the Palm with a local system provides a simple barrier. An infected program can be installed and spread within a handheld, it cannot easily spread to other programs beyond the handheld. Palms tend to be directly infected from the same source; this makes reporting and isolating the malicious code easier. This barrier fails if handheld's become more connected with applications encouraging direct sharing of programs. INSETS: Keeping your Palms Clean of Infection; Anatomy of a Simple Palm Virus.