Worm Developed for Nokia Series-60 Phones

Tuxedo Jack writes "It had to happen. The first worm designed specifically for cellular phones has been developed, and Cabir appears to be a way of effectively killing Nokia Series-60 cellular phones via shortening the battery life due to scanning for nearby Bluetooth devices and propagating itself. This still relies on a user to open it, so hopefully that won't be many, and those that do must use a file manager to find and kill the worm. At least it isn't a dialer!"

Comments

Dangerous Potential

[CommanderData]

It had to happen sooner or later, with people predicting the cell phone will be your next computer.

I guess Series 60 phone owners should be thankful that it just drains battery life. What if the worm sent 80,012 text messages to everyone in your contact list! Imagine the cell network congestion and billing chaos that would ensue... Lets hope cell phone manufacturers start tweaking their phone OSes to prevent that kind of disaster in the future!

Re:Dangerous Potential

[dave1791]

How about a worm that set the phone to silent mode or whatever they are calling the "beep just once, shut up and vibrate" mode these days? There would actually a worm with a noble purpose.

Re:Dangerous Potential

[HTH NE1]

With the capabilities of some phones, such malware could be used to send untraceable junk faxes, spam, dDoMS (multiple services), telemarketing to numbers on the donotcall list (and gathering unlisted cell phone numbers for marketing), defeating legal phone taps, even distributed wardialing to find that elusive number for Protovision.

Whatever nefarious purpose which would require laundering your identity onto another unwitting victim could be done with a worm infecting cell phones, especially if it can spread quickly without user interaction and can establish a channel to listen to for orders (a hacked website). We're not there yet, but it won't be much longer.

Simple Fix

[Brain Stew]

Bluetooth should be turned off out of the box. If an end-user is smart enough to know they want Bluetooth, they probably won't get hit with this attack.

Yes, but how long until there is a dialer? Or...

[Dagny Taggert]

...better yet, a dialer that propagates itself and then sends out pre-recorded sales calls. This may sound crazy now, but will it sound crazy three years from now?

History

[Dark Lord Seth]

This still relies on a user to open it, so hopefully that won't be many

Those who fail to learn from history, are condemned to repeat it.

Oh those users...

[cjellibebi]

>This still relies on a user to open it, so hopefully that won't be many.

Famous last words...

Uh, yeah.

[dannyelfman]

Right, no one *EVER* opens attachments.

``Oh look, Johnny sent me a new ring tone''

ZAP!

Until software companies will devote serious time to making sure their products aren't vulnerable like this, we will continue to see these types of monkey business.

Here we go.

[ATAMAH]

I imagine that because of the cellphone frenzy there soon will be as much advertising (spam) in that medium as there is on the internet. Its just too big and too attractive a market to miss. And as cellphones get more and more features crammed into them - there will be viruses, worms, dialers. And they will be just as common.

anti-virus software people jumping for joy

[Nonillion]

I guess now the anti-virus software people now have themselves a new market to penetrate. I guess windows boxes were not enough to maintain their business model.

Engineering practice

[earthforce_1]

It has to be assumed that any system open to the general public, can be expected to come under hostile attack from hackers/spammers/criminals/terrorists. All hardware and software deployed in the field needs to be examined carefully for this. It is even more critical when you have a "monoculture" of HW/SW, since one exploit compromises the whole system.

History has shown time and time again, hackers will expend a great deal of effort to compromise any accessible system even if just for the heck of it.