28 Days Later – 7 Deadly Mobile Viruses Plague British High Streets
Forget the Rage virus in new feature film, 28 Weeks Later, the real virus threat infecting the UK is coming to a mobile phone near you. A 28-day study of a popular mobile phone's activity in busy British high streets and shopping centres found the mobile had contracted 7 destructive viruses from across Europe. Eight million UK phones are under threat from these viruses, 4 million of which could already be infected without the user's knowledge.
Aptly named Skulls, Doomed and CommWarrior, these viruses, originating in Turkey, Russia and France will all incur untold damage to the data stored on there – corrupting and deleting contacts, calendar and pictures as well as texts, emails, music and videos. Certain viruses were also found to be capable of leaking potentially sensitive information on your phone, such as text messages, pictures and emails to other contacts in your address book, posing a real security threat to British business as well as consumers.
Mobile anti-virus specialists, UMU, found that taking a mobile phone, a Nokia 6630, to British high streets and shopping centres and turning on its Bluetooth receiver or downloading files via MMS, SMS or email opened up the device to immediate attack from hackers renowned for targeting these busy areas. In a matter of minutes the mobile was exposed to a range of viruses threatening to render the phone unusable and in need of complete reformatting - wiping all the information loaded onto it by the owner from contacts, calendar and messages to photos, music and games, which unless backed up, would all be lost. In some cases, the mobile was attacked by other malware which, once downloaded, could allow the hacker to monitor calls, emails and texts, steal private data, send that data onto others in the user's address book and even dial premium rate numbers at the user's expense.
Peter Harrison, CTO, UMU said, “The new breed of viruses are the most malicious we have ever seen. They are built by highly organised criminals, intent on either causing widespread damage or extracting maximum commercial gain. What is really scary is that lots of people may already be infected and not know it. Our monitoring has shown a sustained spike in malware detections this year - there are currently 300 viruses for smartphones. And with over 100 million smartphones now in existence it won't be long before they spread.”
UMU identified five types of powerful viruses and the average number of times these viruses infected the mobile across the 28-day period:
Cabir x 1 - spread via Bluetooth and MMS, it does not directly damage the phone but continually tries to detect other devices to infect, greatly reducing battery life
CommWarrior x 2 - spread as above, it resets the phone on 14th of every month deleting all personal data
Skulls x 1 - downloaded by user, it disables phone applications like phone book, SMS, media player and changes all phone icons to a skull and crossbones leaving it unusable
CardTrap x 2 - spread as above, it overwrites applications such as the phone book with corrupted copies. These applications will no longer work when you next reboot the phone, rendering the phone useless. It also drops installers for Skulls, CommWarrior and Cabir onto the device and puts some Windows viruses onto the memory card so that plugging the memory card into a PC will result in the PC being infected as well.
Doomed x 1 - spread as above, it disables some applications and attempts to prevent the phone from restarting as well as installing Cabir, CommWarrior, Fontal, CardTrap, CardBlock and Skulls. It can also sometimes cause other Bluetooth devices in the vicinity of the infected device to restart.
The study was conducted between Sunday 14th April and Friday 11th May 2007 across Britain, covering ten major
city centres across Britain.
Since the beginning of 2003, 7.3 million smartphones have been sold in the UK according to Canalys Smart Mobile Device and Mobile Navigation research, November 2006
Return to the complete list of news articles.
Aptly named Skulls, Doomed and CommWarrior, these viruses, originating in Turkey, Russia and France will all incur untold damage to the data stored on there – corrupting and deleting contacts, calendar and pictures as well as texts, emails, music and videos. Certain viruses were also found to be capable of leaking potentially sensitive information on your phone, such as text messages, pictures and emails to other contacts in your address book, posing a real security threat to British business as well as consumers.
Mobile anti-virus specialists, UMU, found that taking a mobile phone, a Nokia 6630, to British high streets and shopping centres and turning on its Bluetooth receiver or downloading files via MMS, SMS or email opened up the device to immediate attack from hackers renowned for targeting these busy areas. In a matter of minutes the mobile was exposed to a range of viruses threatening to render the phone unusable and in need of complete reformatting - wiping all the information loaded onto it by the owner from contacts, calendar and messages to photos, music and games, which unless backed up, would all be lost. In some cases, the mobile was attacked by other malware which, once downloaded, could allow the hacker to monitor calls, emails and texts, steal private data, send that data onto others in the user's address book and even dial premium rate numbers at the user's expense.
Peter Harrison, CTO, UMU said, “The new breed of viruses are the most malicious we have ever seen. They are built by highly organised criminals, intent on either causing widespread damage or extracting maximum commercial gain. What is really scary is that lots of people may already be infected and not know it. Our monitoring has shown a sustained spike in malware detections this year - there are currently 300 viruses for smartphones. And with over 100 million smartphones now in existence it won't be long before they spread.”
UMU identified five types of powerful viruses and the average number of times these viruses infected the mobile across the 28-day period:
The study was conducted between Sunday 14th April and Friday 11th May 2007 across Britain, covering ten major
city centres across Britain.
Since the beginning of 2003, 7.3 million smartphones have been sold in the UK according to Canalys Smart Mobile Device and Mobile Navigation research, November 2006
Return to the complete list of news articles.