Phone virus spreads through Scandinavian company.
(InfoWorld) - A mobile phone virus recently hit a small company in Scandinavia and spread from one handset to another, according to security vendor F-Secure.
It was the first instance F-Secure has seen of a mobile virus making serious headway into an enterprise after showing up on an employee's phone, said Ero Carrera, an antivirus researcher at F-Secure, which is based in Helsinki, Finland. The outbreak lasted about a day as dozens of employees received the virus and about 20 of them opened it on their phones, causing it to spread, according to a Web log entry on F-Secure's site. F-Secure did not identify the company that experienced the outbreak or the country where it is based.
Viruses are becoming more common on mobile phones, but most people don't know that, which can help the viruses spread, Carrera said. The virus in this case, called Commwarrior.B, shows up as an attachment to an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) message or via Bluetooth. In an MMS, the user is asked if they want to open the attachment, and in Bluetooth they are asked if they want to accept it and then whether they want to run it. Mobile viruses typically identify themselves as something appealing, such as games or antivirus utilities.
"People probably take for granted that it's just a joke program, because viruses are not that common in the mobile world," Carrera said. "People are not aware that the problem exists, like in the PC world."
When the virus gets on to a phone, it immediately tries to spread itself in two ways: It scans the local area for devices with Bluetooth and tries to send itself to them, and it sends MMS messages to phone numbers on the phone's contact list, Carrera said. It doesn't cause any damage to the phone, he added. At the Scandinavian company, the spread stopped when employees realized what was happening and stopped opening the attachment when it was sent to them, Carrera said.
Though this virus didn't do anything but spread itself, mobile viruses can cause damage. In other cases, mobile phone viruses have disrupted the icons on a phone or prevented users from starting certain applications, Carrera said. In addition, it would probably be easy to write a mobile virus that steals the subject line from a legitimate MMS in order to fool the recipient, as some e-mail worms have done, he added.
Phone viruses aren't as well developed as those for the PC, but worse is yet to come, according to Carrera.
"Probably we'll see these cases happen more in the future in communities where people trust each other," he said.
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