Mobile Viruses Emerge

Symantec continues to monitor the development of malicious code on portable devices. (Think: Cabir-the first worm to infect Sybion OS smart phones using bluetooth to replicate, and Duts.A-the first parasitic infector of portable executable files on Windows CE, and Brandor.A-the forst backdoor trojan to target windows mobile OS (discovered August 5th 2004.) Duts.A demonstrates that virus techniques that appeared in PC viruses can be reused to iinfect files on mobile devices. While the infection method that Duts uses is simplistic and requires user intervention, it is likely that advanced techniques will appear on mobile platforms and will more closely resmble the evolution of PC viruses. The current techniques are present, and the ability to propogate the code is evident. The current trends and outbreaks are few only as a result of the limited number of devices and the relatively new developers environmet. Nevertheless, MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) worms, Classic viruses, and backdoor trojans, are all feasible on these devices. Beware, as more mobile computing devices become more sophisticated and complex, it is likely that more avenues of attack will become evident.