First Symbian OS virus to replicate over MMS

Shachaf writes "A new virus, CommWarrior.a, is the first to replicate over MMS (Multimedia Message Service). From the article: 'Multimedia Message Service (MMS) is a more advanced version of the Short Message Service (SMS) familiar to users of GSM based handsets around the world, and allows rich content such as pictures, sounds, video, and applications to be sent as well as text.', and '"With MMS messages typically costing between $0.25 and $1.00 CommWarrior could prove expensive to anyone unlucky enough to be infected by it. As the virus runs silently in the background it could be quite some time before the user becomes aware of the potentially hundreds of MMS messages that have been sent," said Aaron Davidson, CEO of SimWorks.'"

Comments

another good reason to have a simple cellphone

[Anonymous Coward]

All of my coworkers laugh at me for using such a simple phone with only basic features and services. Guess there are some benefits afterall.

Trojan not virus

[lxdbxr]

I know the nomenclature is largely ignored nowadays, but I would call this a trojan not a virus since it requires the user to run it to start spreading: Quote from the ZDNet version of the story:

A recipient also has to accept and download CommWarrior in order for the Trojan to launch itself.

It's not like it starts running as soon as you open the MMS message; you actually have to take steps to run the application contained in the message. Of course some people will run anything...

Re:If the virus sends a relatively uniform...

[plover]

It's not in the short-term best interests of the cellular providers to block the virus. First, it involves acknowledging the virus exists, which tends to scare people. Next, and here's the cynical greedy part, people who blindly pay their cell phone bills every month without complaint make up a large part of their customer base. If they can make a few million dollars off the virus, where's the incentive to shut it down? Willingly give out reimbursements to anyone who complains, but let the rest of them just continue to fork over cash.

Sorry to be so cynical, but I just see these "services" (and all cell phone costs) as tremendously overpriced. It's just data. The bandwidth has a fixed cost (it's just the sum of maintenance, capital investments, marketing, etc.) Throw in 10% or 20% over cost for a profit margin, and call it done. But no, they have to have "minutes" and "plans" and "packages", all of which are expressly designed to mislead the buyers into spending as much money as possible, regardless of the amount of "service" they "consume." And we, the sheeple, consume it readily.