There was a lot of fuss in the papers and on the web recently about the 'world's first mobile phone virus', called Caribe.
It finally seemed that visions of everyone's mobile suddenly making unwanted calls, sending millions of expensive text messages or even just refusing to work were about to come true.
But in fact there was little to worry about.
What had happened was that a bunch of computer experts in Germany wrote a program that could copy itself from phone to phone.
It uses the Bluetooth wireless feature that modern phones use to link headsets to phones.
It can only copy itself to another phone if the person using that phone actually lets it by selecting 'Yes' three times as it is copied and installed.
And once it's there all it does is display a message and try to copy itself to another phone.
In fact, Caribe isn't a virus at all.
A virus is a program that can make changes to another program, adding a copy of itself to it and hiding there unnoticed until it runs.
Beware the geeks bearing gifts
Caribe is actually a 'Trojan Horse', a program that pretends to be one thing but in fact does something else, just like the Greeks pretended that their big horse was a present.
The Greeks hid soldiers inside their horse. Programmers usually hide stuff to steal confidential information or damage your computer inside their 'horses'.
However just because we don't have to worry about Caribe, that doesn't mean we can relax completely.
The fact that programs like this can be written for mobile phones shows that our phones are now powerful enough for viruses to run on them.
Two years ago a phone was a complicated piece of electronics.
Today, a mobile phone is really just a small computer that can be used to make calls.
And a nasty programmer could write a program to do stuff like send your address book to a stranger, stop you making phone calls or sneak a look at your text messages.
They might even figure out how to make this program spread over the phone network instead of just using Bluetooth to copy itself.
And then we really would have a mobile virus.
Fortunately the people who make phones and write the programs that run on them are a lot more careful about security than PC makers.
They know that phones are a perfect target for virus writers, so they are working hard to keep them safe.
And because they control the network that calls travel over, they are in a much better position to stop viruses spreading than internet users, where the network isn't owned by anyone.
So I don't think we need to worry too much about phone viruses.
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