A Virus That Can Travel Via MMS

Symbian anti-virus specialist SimWorks says that it has identified the first Symbian virus capable of spreading itself via MMS messages. Using MMS the CommWarrior.a virus, as SimWorks have named it, can instantaneously send itself to any other MMS enabled handset where the operator has an MMS interconnection agreement. Unlike many recent "proof of concept" mobile viruses SimWorks has already received a report of CommWarrior in the wild which it is seeking to confirm.

SimWorks CEO Aaron Davidson says "This is a significant development as until now mobile viruses have used Bluetooth to spread which only has a range of 10 meters surrounding the infected device. Using MMS viruses like CommWarrior have a much greater potential to spread globally".

CommWarrior scans the infected phone's address book and periodically sends MMS messages to randomly selected contacts. It sends a copy of itself and one of several predefined text messages designed to encourage the recipient to install the application.

"With MMS messages typically costing between $0.25 and $1.00 CommWarrior could also prove expensive to anyone unlucky enough to be infected by it. As the virus runs silently in the background it could be quite some time before the user becomes aware of the potentially hundreds of MMS messages that have been sent" says Davidson.

In addition to using MMS, CommWarrior also aggressively scans for nearby devices running the Bluetooth wireless communication system common on many modern phones, and sends them a copy as well. CommWarrior is the first mobile virus to use such a two-pronged distribution strategy which may allow much faster and more geographically widespread infection of vulnerable devices.

However, as MMS's are stored then forwarded to the recipient by the network operators own MMSC - it would be fairly simple for the operators to add a virus detector to their MMSC and stop the messages being forwarded."

Posted to the site on 8th March 2005