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New Worm Targets Cell Phones, Turns Them to Zombies

by Tim Stevens on March 10, 2009 at 01:30 PM

We've covered plenty of posts on rogue botnets, which are collections of virus-infected computers that hackers use to fulfill their evil whims, usually by unleashing denial of service attacks on sites they don't like. These compromised computers are often referred to as zombies. Now, with cell phones getting smarter and more capable, the belief is that it won't be long before hackers have fleets of zombie phones at their disposal, too. Well, folks, that very thing may already be happening.

Zombie botnets are usually created by worms like the recently infamous Conficker virus. These worms spread themselves from one computer to another, usually by tricking people into downloading and installing the virus by passing it off as a video or piece of software. There's a new worm, for example, called Yxes.A (a.k.a. "Sexy View"), that's targeting some Nokia handsets. Right now, the virus only collects information about the user, including their phone number and their handset's serial number, but it could realistically do anything it wants -- including place unwanted long-distance calls.

This is only the first phone worm, keep in mind. And it infections usually only hit phones onto which you can install third-party apps, which is increasingly more phones (the iPhone, Nokia Symbian-OS-based phones, Windows Mobile phones, BlackBerrys, Android, etc). Surely, more will be coming. Unfortunately, at present, you're on your own for cell phone virus protection. But you should be just as careful when following links and downloading software there as you are on your home computer. [From: New Scientist]

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Tags: cell phone, CellPhone, nokia, phone virus, phone worm, PhoneVirus, PhoneWorm, security, sexy view, SexyView, top, virus, worm, yxes.a, zombie

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