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M-anarchy poised to target your cell phone?
WHAT if someone tells you that your precious little cell phone has been hit by a virus! A scary thought indeed. “Truly a myth,” you’d like to believe. But the myth is catching on fast with hoaxes and alerts coming regularly to your email telling you how to protect against the “latest” threat, viruses targeting mobile phones.
A hoax email, which even yours truly received a few days back read as:
“Dear all mobile phone’s owners, attention!!! now there is a virus on mobile phone system… all mobile phone in digital system can be infected by this virus… if you receive a phone call and your phone display ‘unavailable’ on the screen don’t answer the call. End the call immediately!!! Because if you answer the call, your phone will be infected by this virus… this virus will erase all imie and imsi information from both your phone and your SIM card which will make your phone unable to connect with the telephone network. You will have to buy a new phone…”
The mail tries to entice the naďve users into believing the content by using authentic looking references and terminologies. Even brand names, such as Motorla and Nokia are used along with CNN website recommendation to certify the news. Also, it gives a figure of three million as the number of mobile users infected so far. We don’t know how many believe it (or not, and why?) but we would certainly like to find origins of such rumours.
The virus mystery
First, let’s take a quick at what a virus is. Conventionally speaking, a virus is a malicious code that harms the host PC and has ability to replicate itself to other files — but now, replication is not limited to files only; the internet has opened highways for virus coders to explore.
Pain in Spain: The very first appearance of a virus (well, sort of) attacking mobile phones took place in Spain in 2000.
Named Timofonica, the virus in effect used computer email system as means of proliferating itself to unleash unwanted numbers of SMS messages to randomly selected subscribes that bore fake (virus-generated) IDs that looked like real.
Timofonica attacked only the Telefonica company network. Much like other script viruses, this one too relied on the target’s email address book to get new victims, and each time it was forwarded, it had a mechanism to send an email message to Telefonica’s Moviestar service’s email to GSM gateway.
A valid Telefonica number was generated using area code combined with random six digit number and finally “@correo.moviestar.net” towards the end. Although, belonging to type ‘worm’ and that too propagated by emails, this virus wasn’t a real threat to mobile phones, as such, but it sure has paved the way for future developments in the filed m-anarchy.
Incident in Holland: Other reported incident of this nature includes one in Holland. Researchers in Holland discovered a bug in the operating system used in many popular Nokia phones. According to ABCNews service, a hacker could possibly create an SMS message to exploit that bug with an effect to crash that operating system — but, thankfully, it was just the researches who found that out!
Stuck in Russia: Similar to what was found in Spain, one Russian anti-virus company claimed to have found a malicious program attempting to send junk messages to mobile phone users. Although rare and not much damaging, the incident (which was reported by BBC) reminds us of the dangers to come.
Why not a pure mobile phone virus? Your calculator, digital VCR, washing machine and air conditioner are all virus free. So are your cell phones — at least for now. As all the operations you perform on your phone are the embedded programs that are hardwired, it becomes impossible for someone else to run his own set of commands (executable) on your device. Until and unless our mobile phones allow advanced options like automation, scripting and programmed commands accepting capabilities to the operation system used, there will be no threat. This is to say, there exists a tradeoff between amount of facility and security — to increase one you have to compromise the other. A word of assurance; any virus today for mobile phones can’t be more harmful than a wrong number or lately, a wrong message — check your own set or ask your friends and they will tell what the latest in SMS spam is!
Future not too bright: The future of mobile phones, as far as security and contingency against viruses are concerned, is not too bright. It is widely believed that once we take a step further and transit into the world of applets and small applications from ring tones and android like graphics, potential of writing workable malevolent code will increase many folds.
Chief researcher at Symantec’s Anti-virus Research Centre, Eric Chien, is of this opinion: “We believe we will see these (mobile) viruses in the future.”
F-Secure Corp, the security firm which busted the Timofonica virus is also not optimist about the issue. Technical training manager there, Dan Takata, observed, “Timofonica does not infect your cell phone, but somewhere down the line we will see viruses that do.”
At IBM’s T J Watson Research Centre in New York, anti-virus experts have warned that mobile phone designers will have to come up with ways to protect phones against infection from malicious code.
Mobile phone manufacturers are not taking it easy as well. A spokesman for Nokia admitted the credibility of this issue if not urgency, saying, “It depends on how development is going . . . . Since mobile phones are developing more like PCs, it will be possible to do malicious things with them.”
As mobile phones of the future will continue to upgrade their operating systems/platforms/languages to more advanced ones, possibly Linux and Java, and come more close to computers, threat of having a mobile phone virus will only grow. One more pessimistic (or realistic) thought by some analysts: “There’s no question of whether a mobile phone virus will appear. The question is when.”
But, for the time being, there is no need to worry. Simply put, mobiles of our age aren’t that hi-fi as to make them vulnerable to act as virus hosting platforms. It doesn’t only take a brain of a genius to write a virus, but also, an operating system where that code can be executed. And that in case of mobiles - is not that immediate a threat.
Fake alarms
About the deceptive emails, hoaxes (call them pranks!): don’t go for the technical sounding jargons used in them. Always check with an authentic source like the updates of major anti-virus developers. And remember: don’t press that panic button the next time you see a newer version of this hoax, plus never forward those emails. Not succeeding in making a virus for mobile phones, they might want to spam us all in revenge!
The writer
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