Throwback Thursday: Palm Breach

This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to July 2000, when concerns were growing about malicious threats to the Palm Personal Digital Assistant.

In the 1980s, no one left home without their Filofax. Today, of course, almost no one leaves home without their smartphone, but in 2000 the must-have pocket device was the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

While Filofaxes had contained important names and numbers, PDAs were more than just an address book. Combined with Internet access, their functionality verged on that of a desktop computer combined with a cell phone. Of course, that meant that they were attractive targets for malware writers. In July 2000, Eric Chien presented an overview of the malicious threats to the

Palm

Personal Digital Assistant — concluding that the only way to be 100% secure, would be to revert to the old Filofax…

Eric’s article can be read

here

in HTML-format, or downloaded

here

as a PDF. A paper Eric presented at the VB2000 conference providing a more in-depth look at not only the

Palm

, but also

EPOC32

and

Windows CE

devices can be downloaded

here

(PDF).

Posted on 06 August 2015 by

Helen Martin