Reports of the virus arrived at F-Secure's laboratories in Finland Friday morning and although the company says the risk of infection is relatively low, it issued a warning advising Palm users to be vigilant.

"This virus has no means of replicating itself" says Paul Brettle, product consultant at F-Secure, "which means the risk of infection is pretty low." But while Palm users breath a sigh of relief, Brettle warns that more virulent strains are bound to follow. "Someone has obviously spent a long time working on this virus and now knows and understands the Palm environment well enough to write malicious code. More Palm viruses are likely."

Phage infects add-in applications downloaded onto Palm machines either via connection to a PC or via disc. Files are corrupted causing them to lock up. Users struck by Phage will be greeted by a dark gray box on their screens followed by application shut down.

F-Secure is advising users to delete any file which is found with the virus using the Palm device's 'application delete' function. Recovery from this threat requires a hard-reset followed by synchronisation of the PDA device with the user's PC.

F-Secure is developing a fix for the virus which will be available later today.

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. The Phage virus is capable of disabling programs on the Palm forcing them to be deleted.

Reports of the virus arrived at F-Secure's laboratories in Finland Friday morning and although the company says the risk of infection is relatively low, it issued a warning advising Palm users to be vigilant.

"This virus has no means of replicating itself" says Paul Brettle, product consultant at F-Secure, "which means the risk of infection is pretty low." But while Palm users breath a sigh of relief, Brettle warns that more virulent strains are bound to follow. "Someone has obviously spent a long time working on this virus and now knows and understands the Palm environment well enough to write malicious code. More Palm viruses are likely."

Phage infects add-in applications downloaded onto Palm machines either via connection to a PC or via disc. Files are corrupted causing them to lock up. Users struck by Phage will be greeted by a dark gray box on their screens followed by application shut down.

F-Secure is advising users to delete any file which is found with the virus using the Palm device's 'application delete' function. Recovery from this threat requires a hard-reset followed by synchronisation of the PDA device with the user's PC.

F-Secure is developing a fix for the virus which will be available later today.

ZDNet will advise when the patch is available and make it available on the downloads channel.

More details to follow.

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