The Dangerous and Sudden Growth of Smart Phone Menaces - The Beginning
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Every story has a beginning. The prologue for mobile viruses started when these little devices became popular enough to be potential targets for either pilfering personal information on a frequent basis or just for financial gains. One decade ago, when only one out of one hundred people had a phone that had any advanced functions, there was no demand for malware.
Nowadays, in most countries, the statistics are showing over 100 percent coverage, which means that there are more mobile phones being used than the total population. This is possible because lots of people are using more than one phone on a daily basis. Because everybody must be reached any time and anywhere, these little buggers have garnered enough attention.
(Photo Courtesy of "Dance with Shadows")
Thereafter, virus writers began to test and try different approaches to solve the problem of self-multiplication in order to affect lots of phones and achieve prevalence. The first straightforward way to accomplish this was by using the address book as a source. This is a proven technique that dates back to the early days of e-mail viruses (infected fake attachments, embedded images, malicious code, etc.).
With cell phones you can transfer data via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (through the Internet), or just sending SMS text messages or MMS multimedia messages. The first two are rather obvious and require no further explanation at all. They are based on tricking the user into downloading and/or installing content that is, in fact, infected or independent malware.
The latter two are also quite silly, but rather surprising if you don't know what they are about. They act exactly the same way as mass-mailers: send messages (either SMS or MMS, depending on the virus) to all of the entries in your address book. This can be accompanied by an advertisement (read as: spam) that can be pretty much guaranteed to be read by thousands, if the virus goes through.
It makes sense that the number of infected phones increases exponentially, since more and more people are attacked. Chances are that everybody has more than a few entries in their address books.
On a positive note, we must also state that these security threats can not affect your phone without your intervention. This means that you actually need to take action and open up that MMS/SMS you've just received or install that application.
(Image Courtesy of "F-Secure Corporation")
On the other hand, if you fail to stop the virus and it gets into your phone, then our suggestion is to stop it as soon as possible. You should turn off your phone at the first sign of "something wrong." Download anti-virus applications or explicitly search for disinfection tools using the symptoms your smart phone is exhibiting. There are lots of anti-virus suites for Symbian operating systems, such as F-Secure Mobile Antivirus, Zeon Anti-Virus, AntiCommWarrior, SimWorks Anti-Virus, and Kaspersky A-V. Google for others!
Right above the previous paragraph, you can see the screen shot of a particular virus that disabled all the functions of a phone. Notice those skulls filling up the menu. Other viruses can do things like steal your personal (confidential) information, or even dial premium (foreign) numbers that might cost a lot later, when you receive the bill. These reasons should have convinced you to be careful.
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