Viruses & Malware

A new phone virus dubbed Commwarrior poses a worldwide threat, anti-virus vendors said Tuesday.

The virus is aimed at smartphones based on Nokia's Series 60 platform, which is based on the Symbian OS. According to anti-virus vendor F-Secure, it spreads via multimedia messaging service (MMS) messages and possibly through a vulnerability in Bluetooth capabilities.

F-Secure noted that, while the virus has the potential to spread quickly, it is moving slowly for now. The company also said that initial indications are that the virus originated in Russia.

Security watchers have warned that the Kelvir.B worm has begun spreading around the world, dropping a payload in the form of another worm, known as Spybot, on infected PCs.

The worm spreads using MSN Messenger when unwitting recipients click on a URL in a message reading: "lol! see it! u'll like it"

Once clicked the link downloads a variant of the Spybot worm and sends a message to everyone else on the user's contact list.

Virus writers have created a new Trojan capable of infecting Symbian Series 60 smartphones. Dampig-A, discovered March 4, attempts to trick users into downloading it by posing as the cracked version of the FSCaller application, developed by SymbianWare of Germany. The Trojan (a malicious SIS file dropper) disables some built-in applications and third party file managers and attempts to install variants of the Cabir worm onto infected handsets.

Well it probably was always on the cards at some point ever since the first Symbian OS based worm/virus/Trojan was written to do nasty things to your mobile phone. Those innovative virus writers have done it again, a Symbian OS based worm that can use the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) as a infection medium.
The worm is known as Commwarrior and is a worm for Symbian Series 60 mobile phones, it attempts to spread using Bluetooth and MMS. MMS messages are text messages that include an image, audio or video. MMS messages are sent from one phone to another or to email.

Mobile phones infected with the Cabir virus have turned up in Japan and France, according to antivirus software company F-Secure of Helsinki.

The new infections bring the number of countries where Cabir infections have been reported to 16. But Cabir is still a slow-spreading and relatively rare virus that is unlikely to affect most mobile phone users, said Mikko Hypponen, manager of antivirus research at F-Secure.

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.

The Christmas card worm -- Zafi.d -- is still dominating the virus charts, as people continue to report having run the program thinking it was a seasonal greeting.

Zafi.d, which in its third month at number one in the Sophos virus charts, contains a Trojan horse program that gives hackers remote control of an infected PC. Sophos found the Hungarian-written worm accounted for one in three viruses detected.

February's top ten, published on Wednesday, was dominated by old viruses and contained only two new entries -- Bagle-BK and Sober-K.

Security researchers at antivirus company McAfee have today upped their risk assessment of the Bagle.dldr Trojan, which is spreading rapidly.

The company has raised its assessment after spotting more variants of the worm, and said that its Avert virus response team has received "more than 100 distinct reports of these variants in the wild".

Rather than a mass-mailing worm, BagleDl-L is a Trojan horse that damages security applications and attempts to connect with a number of Web sites. It has been sent via spam lists to millions of addresses in the past 12 hours, said security company McAfee, which has upgraded it to a "medium" risk. The new variant could also have boosted overall Bagle traffic, which has increased five times in the past 24 hours, e-mail security vendor Postini said Tuesday.

Heard this one before? You must run antivirus software and keep it up to date or else your PC will get infected, you'll lose all your data, and you'll incur the wrath of every email correspondent you unknowingly infect because of your carelessness.