Cell-phone Viruses- Part 1

The first known cell-phone virus appeared in 2004 and didn't
get very far. Cabir.A infected only a small number of
Bluetooth-enabled phones and carried out no malicious action
-- a group of malware developers created Cabir to prove it
could be done. Their next step was to send it to anti-virus
researchers, who began the process of developing a solution
to a problem that promises to get a lot worse.

Cell-phone viruses are at the threshold of their
effectiveness. At present, they can't spread very far and
they don't do much damage, but the future might see
cell-phone bugs that are as debilitating as computer viruses.
In this article, we'll talk about how cell-phone viruses
spread, what they can do and how you can protect your phone
from current and future threats.

Cell-phone Virus Basics

A cell-phone virus is basically the same thing as a computer
virus -- an unwanted executable file that "infects" a device
and then copies itself to other devices. But whereas
a computer virus or worm spreads through e-mail attachments
and Internet downloads, a cell-phone virus or worm spreads
via Internet downloads, MMS (multimedia messaging service)
attachments and Bluetooth transfers. The most common type of
cell-phone infection right now occurs when a cell phone
downloads an infected file from a PC or the Internet, but
phone-to-phone viruses are on the rise.

Current phone-to-phone viruses almost exclusively infect
phones running the Symbian operating system. The large number
of proprietary operating systems in the cell-phone world is
one of the obstacles to mass infection. Cell-phone-virus
writers have no Windows-level marketshare to target, so any
virus will only affect a small percentage of phones.

Infected files usually show up disguised as applications like
games, security patches, add-on functionalities and, of
course, pornography and free stuff. Infected text messages
sometimes steal the subject line from a message you've
received from a friend, which of course increases the
likelihood of your opening it -- but opening the message
isn't enough to get infected. You have to choose to open the
message attachment and agree to install the program, which is
another obstacle to mass infection: To date, no reported
phone-to-phone virus auto-installs. The installation
obstacles and the methods of spreading limit the amount of
damage the current generation of cell-phone virus can do.