Monday, March 07, 2005

First MMS mobile phone virus

I just heard from people at F-Secure that they found the first MMS mobile phone virus. They call it CommWarrior. MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service. These are text messages that include an image, audio or video. MMS messages are sent from one phone to another or to email.
Phone viruses so far have been spreading over Bluetooth - so they only affected phones that were nearby. A MMS virus can potentially go global in minutes, just like email worms do.
First analysis shows that it attempts to spread over both MMS and Bluetooth. The virus seems to be from Russian, as it contains text that says "OTMOP03KAM HET!". Which roughly translates to "No to braindeads".
We'll definitely see more and more problematic mobile phone viruses. How long before we will get a real problem with this kind of viruses remains an open question.