Virus threat seeps into mobile phone and PDA territory
The anti-virus industry is bracing for an inevitable epidemic, one that will strike at the heart of your personal information database - your mobile phone or PDA.
With more and more people upgrading to digital handsets that connect to 2.5G and 3G services and relying more on their mobile devices to store personal data, the possibility of a real attack in the near future is imminent. As far back as four years ago, technology scientists spotted the first virus to attack mobile phones via the internet, which many had since forgotten.
Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Labs found a virus dubbed Timofonica in Spain. Being the first of its kind, the primitive virus did not do much damage. It sent meaningless but annoying text messages to mobile phones through the Spanish MoviStar mobile phone network website. However, it was the potential damage it could have done that made everyone sit up and listen.
If such a virus attacked a text messaging service that charged users per message, it could rack up huge bills. Timofonica was a harbinger of things to come.
Last month, just such a virus struck. A Trojan, it was buried in pirated copies of a game called Mosquitoes, roaming file-sharing and software download sites. Once the pirated copy of the game is installed, a Trojan sends unauthorised text messages on premium rate numbers. The victims racked up huge phone bills without knowing it.
The game works only on mobile phones that run the Symbian OS series 60 such as the Nokia NGage QD.
Symbian, however, said the software did not seem to have been created with malicious intent. Rather, the feature was incorporated in early versions of the game by the legitimate manufacturer, Ojom, as an experimental licensing and copy protection mechanism.
The Mosquito Trojan was a clear indication that users need to be aware of the risks of downloading and installing illegal or pirated software, Symbian said.
McAfee Sydney-based analyst Allan Bell said there were more attacks in the first quarter of this year alone than in all of last year - the largest attack year in history.
'We are seeing the hacker move from just PC to everything that's tied to the internet and IT. PDAs, internet phones and 3G phones are prime targets,' he said.
This comes mere months after the Cabir warning - the first network worm capable of spreading via Bluetooth to mobile phones running the Symbian OS.
Mr Bell said the two recent episodes of Cabir and Mosquito Trojan underscored how virus writers were now focusing on smartphones, mobile phones that are always connected to the internet and have PDA-like processing power.
The two major makers of smartphone operating systems are Symbian and Microsoft. A wide range of phones from a number of manufacturers use the Symbian OS, including Nokia and Sony-Ericsson, and it is installed in more than 70 per cent of all internet-capable phones.
Mr Bell said particularly at risk were mobile devices which ran Microsoft software that synchronised with the Windows operating system, which runs more than 97 per cent of the world's desktop computers. Microsoft's Windows Mobile 2003 operating system is used on O2's XDA series and certain Motorola phones.
In mid-July, a virus that infects Windows CE was developed - the first such bug discovered for the handheld operating system, according to Romania-based security firm BitDefender.
The concept virus for Microsoft's operating system for smartphones was believed to have been developed by the 29A VX group that created the Cabir worm program for the Symbian operating system.
These first worms were more annoying than damaging, said Mr Bell, but this was going to change soon.
While there is definitely a self-serving reason for security firms' to sound the alarm in the early days of mobile phone viruses, it is nevertheless a threat that mobile device users cannot ignore.
'I'll say without exaggeration that my life revolves around my BlackBerry,' said a bank public relations manager. 'Most of the critical data is backed up on a server but the possibility of a virus rendering my BlackBerry useless for even a couple of hours, is enough to justify spending that $260 on an anti-virus software.'
McAfee is betting its future on mobile phone virus protection. It believes mobile phones will become the most prevalent way virus writers will launch attacks on the digital world.
To this end, McAfee claims it will be the first to introduce virus protection for 3G phones. The product will be launched next month.
