Phone virus spreads through Scandinavian company

IDG News Service - A mobile phone virus recently hit a small company in Scandinavia and spread from one handset to another, according to security vendor F-Secure Corp.
It was the first time F-Secure has seen a mobile virus make serious headway into an enterprise after showing up on an employee's phone, said Ero Carrera, an antivirus researcher at Helsinki, Finland-based F-Secure. The outbreak lasted about a day as dozens of employees received the virus and about 20 of them opened it on their phones, causing it to spread, according to a Web log entry on F-Secure's site.
F-Secure did not identify the company that experienced the outbreak or where it is based.
Viruses are becoming more common on mobile phones, but most people don't know that, which can help the viruses spread, Carrera said. The virus in this case, called Commwarrior.B, shows up as an attachment to an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) message or via Bluetooth. In MMS, users are asked if they want to open the attachment, and in Bluetooth, they are asked if they want to accept it and then whether they want to run it. Mobile viruses typically identify themselves as something appealing, such as games or antivirus utilities.
"People probably take for granted that it's just a joke program, because viruses are not that common in the mobile world," Carrera said. "People are not aware that the problem exists, like in the PC world."
When the virus gets onto a phone, it immediately tries to spread itself in two ways: It scans for devices with Bluetooth and tries to send itself to them, and it sends MMS messages to phone numbers in the phone's contact list, Carrera said. It doesn't cause any damage to the phone, he said. At the Scandinavian company, the virus was stopped when employees realized what was happening and stopped opening the attachment when it was sent to them, Carrera said.
Though this virus didn't do anything but spread, mobile viruses can cause damage. In other cases, mobile phone viruses have disrupted the icons on a phone or prevented users from starting certain applications, Carrera said. In addition, it would probably be easy to write a mobile virus that steals the subject line from a legitimate MMS in order to fool the recipient, as some e-mail worms have done, he said.
Phone viruses aren't as well developed as those for the PC, but the worse is yet to come, according to Carrera.
"Probably we'll see these cases happen more in the future in communities wherepeople trust each other," he said.

Reprinted with permission from

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