The world's first MMS-spread mobile phone virus has been detected in the wild.
The global threat of mobile phone viruses increased yesterday with the revelation of a mobile phone virus called Commwarrior which has the potential to spread globally through the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) protocol. In addition, the virus can replicate locally through Bluetooth wireless technology.
The first indication of Commwarrior was made in January via a Serbian discussion forum, warning of a virus spreading among Symbian Series 60 platform phones by randomly sending MMS messages automatically to an infected phone's contacts list. MMS text messages can include an image, audio or video elements. Commwarrior sends MMS messages from one phone to another, or to the phone owner's email contacts.
By doing so, the virus has the potential to very rapidly spread globally.
So far, however, it has failed to do so and is replicating slowly. First indications suggest that the virus is Russian in origin, as it contains text that says "OTMOP03KAM HET!" which roughly translates as "No to braindeads".
Antti Vihavainen at anti-virus firm F-Secure said,
"The situation is not critical since we have not received a lot of reports from our customers. However, CommWarrior creates unwanted billing for the owners of infected phones by sending MMS messages without user interaction. The phones can be easily protected by using common sense. None of today's mobile viruses can install themselves without the user accepting the standard security warnings."
In the event that a user's phone is not running any anti-virus software, it is advisable not to install any applications arriving in MMS messages and keep Bluetooth in undiscoverable mode.