We've reported before on the security risks posed by bluetooth on mobile phones, and it seems that our fears have been confirmed as some bright spark has finally worked out how to spread a virus between phones using bluetooth.
Codenamed Cabir by Anti-Virus company Kapersky Labs, the mobile virus is not reported to have actually caused any damage so far. Rather, it appears to be more of a proof of concept than anything else. The virus only infects phones which are running the Symbian Operating System, and if infected a phones screen will display the text "Caribe". The virus software loads every time the phone starts, and scans nearby phone devices using bluetooth to find other susceptible devices. If it finds one it will infect them.
This is not a particularly dangerous virus, with the only potential issue being a reduced battery life due to heavy usage of the bluetooth transceiver. It is however a worrying discovery, as no doubt more malicious phone viruses will start to appear.
The current solution is to make sure bluetooth is disabled on your phone when you are not using it. Anti-virus software for mobile phones is somewhat thin on the ground, with vendors apparently pushing more functionality rather than security on these devices. Hopefully this will come as a wake up call to phone and software developers, particularly as phones move away from being simple communications devices, and more towards being always on PDA devices with much of the functionality previously only available on much larger devices.
We'll have to wait and see, and as always, we'll keep you posted.