The threat may have worked - after all, we have yet to see a malicious application emerge on the iPhone.

Applications known to be safe are allowed Internet access, and vice versa for malicious applications.

The program matches an application found on the user's computer with a list of trusted and malicious applications.

The hosted environment is intended to protect the computer from malicious applications.

A knowledge base of these characteristics will be created, allowing researchers to distinguish between benign and malicious applications.

A spokeswoman for the site said it disabled malicious applications as soon as they were reported.

It would suffice to insert function calls are authorized by the privileges of the malicious application.

Thus, if a call is triggered by a malicious application, the user can see, and take appropriate action.

When such actions are triggered, the activity of a malicious application can be sometimes detected if one monitors the various resources used on the phone.

This means the spread of a malicious application that managed to evade security checks can be immediately stopped when the threat is discovered.