
New face in town: the Beselo worm. It targets Nokia smartphones. The security firms, among which SMobile Systems, are worried and are trying to develop a disinfection device.On its blog, F-Secure, an anti-virus supplier, posted a warning concerning the virus. Smartphones running the Symbian S60 Second Edition operating system are the affected one.
The worm is masked as common media file extensions and lets users think they’ll get a picture or a sound file and not a Symbian application. F-Secure said that the virus transmits files called beauty.jpg, sex.mp3, and love.rm.
Of course, F-secure counseled the users not to welcome every installation prompt if asking to open the file. The security firm added that this is not the proper way to have the Symbian platform and the costumers should download an anti-virus program, created for S60 smartphones.
As well, SMobile put forward, as part of its Security Shield platform for S60 smartphones, an anti-virus update and disinfection tool. It seems that Nokia 6630, 7610, 6680, and N70 smartphone models are the new targets.
Once getting inside the phone, a viral multimedia message carrying a Symbian Installation Source version of the Beselo virus, finds the phone's contact lists and infests the phone numbers.
Although the mobile viruses aren’t so dangerous (the adequate term is proof-of-concept), they can be considered as belonging to a close circle, is also true that their functionality progressed along with their utilization.
George Tuvell, SMobile's CTO, declared that "This is one of the most advanced viruses to date. It uses MMS and Bluetooth to spread. This virus is similar to a Commwarrior virus that hit in 2005" and "This one isn't actually a Commwarrior variant" but a better developed one.
Using Bluetooth and MMS, Commwarrior aims Symbian S60 smartphones and sends, through the infected phones, malicious SIS files to those within their Bluetooth wireless range. |