Viruses Gearing up For The Smart Set
As the boundaries between cell phones and desktop functionality blur, the danger of a worldwide wireless virus increases.
Do those sound like the words a doomsayer would revel in pronouncing? After all, Paris Hilton and her T-Mobile address book aside, there hasn't been anything approaching a worldwide cell phone security problem since carriers first started adding data capabilities to their handsets.
Take the first reports of Cabir, a cell phone virus that got its start last year as a proof-of-concept vulnerability on Symbian OS-enabled phones. This was before people started discovering the virus in cell phones throughout Europe, Asia and finally the United States.
To call Cabir a cell phone virus is somewhat of a misnomer. The bug doesn't travel over a mobile phone carrier's network, but rather through the Bluetooth connections found in certain types of mobile phones, which limits how far and how fast it can travel. When a user accepts a caribe.sis file and elects to install the program, Cabir searches for other Bluetooth-enabled devices in its range.
For the time being, there's no payload attached to the virus, although security firm Symantec (Quote, Chart) warns the virus will shorten battery life because of the repeated scans for other Bluetooth devices.
Not as prevalent, but more destructive, is the Skulls Trojan (define), which, when installed, overwrites Symbian OS application info and icons and replaces them with a skull icon.
