All Symbian 60 phone owners keep a watch on your bluetooth activity
I have switched off the bluetooth on my symbian 60 series phone after reading on the outbreak of the virus Skulls.B though there have rarely been cases of the virus in India.
Mobile phones running Symbian Ltd.'s Series 60 operating system are the target of a new strain of the Skulls Trojan horse program. The new Trojan comes with the Cabir.B worm, which, unlike the first version of the virus, can spread to other phones within reach of Bluetooth broadcasting range.
"What is harmful about Skulls.B is that it can spread to other Bluetooth-enabled phones," said Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research at Helsinki-based F-Secure Corp. "Skulls.A was bad in that it can wipe out all your applications, including your phone book, but it can't infect other phones."
Trojan horse programs are destructive and can modify the configuration of PCs but typically don't attempt to infect other machines, as do viruses and worms.
Although it contains programming similar to that of its predecessor, Skulls.B doesn't replace the menu icons of Series 60 phones with images of skulls that disable applications like e-mail and Short Message Service. Instead, it uses Symbian default icons, which look like jigsaw puzzle pieces, but have the same destructive result as the skulls.
For users to infect their phones with Skulls.B, however, they have to make a bit of an effort: They need to press the Skulls.B icon in the menu to activate the Trojan, according to Hypponen. A programming error prevents the virus from automatically running after installing itself on the phone, he said.
F-Secure advises users of Series 60 smart phones to set their handsets into nondiscoverable (hidden) Bluetooth mode and offers advice online about fixing infected mobile phones.
F-Secure offers online advice to fix up the phone and it is acessible at link http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/cabir.shtml
F_Secure has offered a removal tool kit for the virus and is in a sis installer format.
You can continue to read more on the article at http://www.computerworld.com
Nitin
posted by Nitin @ 12/01/2004 06:07:00 PM
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