Talk about a tempting target. With 219 million cellular phones in use in the United States, a 
cyber-attack could potentially wreak as much havoc as a virus on PCs.
That’s where Hao Chen comes in.
Along with two graduate students, the assistant professor of computer science at the University of California-Davis is studying the vulnerabilities of cellular phones, hoping to fend off potential attackers.
"Cellular phones are part of our critical information infrastructure," said Chen, talking in his spartan office on the UC Davis campus. "In some ways, they’re more important than the Internet. We rely on cell phones for everything from emergency response and rescue to military operations."
Anti-virus researchers, such as Symantec Corp. and Trend Micro Inc., are working on products to keep viruses from attacking "smart phones" like the Treo, which are as much like PCs as phones.
Chen and his team, however, are concerned about a broader kind of attack. Scripps Howard News Service