Phone viruses to spread as telecom, computer worlds merge

BARCELONA, Spain--Viruses and hacking on mobile phones are still rare but attacks are a looming danger as increasing numbers of people access the Internet and download files with their handsets, experts say.

A survey released this week at the industry's Mobile World Congress showed that only 2.1 percent of people had been struck by a virus themselves and only 11.6 percent knew someone who had been affected by one.

The poll by IT security specialist McAfee, based on 2,000 people in Britain, the United States and Japan, showed that 86.3 percent had had no experience of mobile phone viruses.

The survey did suggest however that the more developed the mobile market is, with high use of the Internet and downloads, the more likely people were to be hit by bugs.

Virus attacks in Japan, the most developed mobile phone market in the world, were far more commonplace than elsewhere.

"We should look at places like Japan which is where the future of mobile technology is," said Graham Cluley, a consultant at Sophos, another IT security firm.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we saw this problem growing because the phone is going to grow into a sort of mobile computer."

The website www.mobilephoneviruses.com, which tracks incidents of mobile virus infections, lists a handful of examples such as Skulls, Velasco and Commwarrior.

The latter infected about 110,000 phones in Spain last year, attacking phones running Nokia's Symbian operating system. It spread via MMS messages, text messages containing an audio, video or picture file.

"Viruses aren't a huge issue now but they have the potential to be so in the future when Internet use is more widespread," said a telecom analyst at the Forrester market research company, Pete Nuthall.

The industry is keen for phone owners to use their handsets for more than just calls and texting -- for which profits are declining in developed countries -- with Internet and video, games and mapping the basis of new product offerings.

"It's a risk that we should be aware of but one shouldn't make it dramatic and worry people," said Emmanuel Forgues from Russian IT security group Kaspersky. "But it's a risk that exists and is certainly going to develop."

"There are few viruses that attack the operating system now. What people are looking at is how to propogate viruses," Forgues added.

One use of a virus would be to implant something in a user's address book for publicity or fraudulent purposes, for example.

Cluley said there were about 350,000 viruses written to attack computers running Microsoft Windows and about 200 known ones for mobile phone operating systems.

Computer viruses were now being written by organized crime gangs to steal money and personal information, while mobile phone viruses "have tended to be written by kids to show off," he said

A 12-year-old boy wrote a virus for the new Apple iPhone which disables it, "turning it into a brick," said Cluley, and a user had to go to the boy's Internet site and download some software.

This crude bit of malware, which could not spread from phone to phone, was said to be an upgrade for the iPhone's operating system.

At French network operator Orange, a spokesperson explained that "with the convergence of the worlds of IT and telecoms the threat is going to get more and more serious.

"What interest developers is that their viruses spread as much as possible," but the company added that telephones used a number of different operating systems at the present time, make this difficult.

Nuthall predicts that "it'll take one big public mobile phone virus attack to create alarm."

In the future, he expects the network operators like Orange to provide protection to their clients.

"You'll end up seeing operators selling bundled services which include a McAfee solution, for example," he said. Agence France-Presse