Viruses infect over 32m phones globally

More than 32 million mobile phones were infected by malicious mobile phone programs globally in 2012, triple the previous year's level, a major domestic mobile security firm said Monday in a report.

The figure last year represented a huge jump from the 10.8 million handsets that were infected in 2011. A total of 65,227 kinds of mobile virus were found, a stunning 263- percent jump from a year ago, according to Netqin, a Beijing-based mobile security firm.

More than 94 percent of the infected handsets were Android smartphones in 2012, followed by 4 percent that ran on Symbian, a system for old Nokia models.

The iPhone, running on the iOS system, was relatively safe, according to Netqin.

"The latest virus has been able to infect devices on various platforms including both personal computers and phones," said Netqin. "People should be more cautious about junk messages, unknown software download sites and malicious web links."

The malicious programs stole personal privacy and caused phones to crash or run slowly. Some even caused users huge economic loss because their bank accounts and passwords were stolen, industry experts said.

The four most dangerous mobile virus found in 2012 were Bill Shocker, VDloader, DyPusher and FireLeaker. All of them were able to access users' contact list and upload to hackers' servers with the users being unaware.

China is the world's biggest mobile phone market with more than 1 billion users.

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