Sunday, April 16, 2006

I think I got the Commwarrior worm

A few days ago, at dawn and after of only a couple of hours of sleep.. my phone rings. I wake up and check the phone half-asleep. A message! "What kind of an ill person sends me a message at 6.38am?" I thought to myself. I opened the message and I realised that it was a multimedia message (MMs) which I would have to download if I wanted to receive. By principle I do not use MMS, I believe it is just another way of the mobile phone companies to make a lot of money, so I have not activated GPRS in my phone. "No, thanks!" I angrily thought again and went to sleep again.

But I was alerted. I considered this to be another inexplicable mobile phone phenomenon, because nobody sends me MMS. The few people who have tried to do so, I explained them that I do not use MMS. It has happened before that I get in weird hours such multimedia messages and I have dismissed them as another spam effort of mobile phone frauds but this is another issue.

Then last night, a "eureka event" occured to me! I had forgotten all about this mms and I downloaded from the F-Secure Weblog a speech of the director who lectured on mobile phone viruses. This guy seems very knowledgable and I got engrossed in this fascinating security speech. At some point he started describing the various mobile phone viruses, the way they function and why people get infected. Well what do you know? There is a virus worm called Commwarrior that sends itself to other phones through an MMS ONLY during the night until 7am. At 7-8 am it deletes all logs from the phone to erase proofs to its activity. Now this is amazing, I believe someone sent me the Commwarrior and I am now thinking of activating gprs and downloading it :)). I would have to delete all people from my phonebook though, because I wouldnt want it spreading to others. During the day it infects other phones via bluetooth.

If you want to listen to this fascinating speech about mobile phone viruses visit this page.

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