Several security experts think that because of the increasing number of smartphone users as well as the comparative ease of spreading viruses across these platforms, that smartphone security will be tested this year.

Attacks on smartphones haven’t reached the critical mass needed but it will happen sooner rather than later,” antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky, tells Red Herring.

"Mobile phone attacks scale very well for fraud," Internet Security Systems chief technology officer Chris Rouland also tells the publication.

"Phone viruses are propagating quickly and they have only been gated by the fact that there are not enough smartphone users today," he told the magazine. 

Rouland added that because phone carriers would likely have to bear the $100-per-incident cost of cleaning infected handhelds, only a few hundred infected phones are enough to cause a problem. 

Yet network security executive Simon Klalaf disagrees. The Vernier Networks CEO tells Red Herring that the financial incentives that spur malware writers to develop viruses are not there for smartphones.

“Putting a worm on laptops where the objective is to steal financial or personal data is a bigger problem for everyone,” he tells Red Herring.