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

Scams on the Internet

VIEWS FROM A BRIT - Manila Times
By Mike Wootton


The number of spam type e- mails in my in boxes is increasing rapidly recently. The hackers are managing to break down many more barriers. Most people know that opening attachments to unknown emails is a very risky thing to do, I’ve done it myself at my cost. What puzzles me is why do people do this sort of things? One theory put forward was that a certain hacker picked up a high paying job in Microsoft after being spotted as clearly very computer literate and able to devise and implant into innocent users computers, viruses and worms which wipe out most of the recipients hard disc memory. To say that having most of your computer data wiped out is to say the least very irritating. What satisfaction can a person get from wiping out data belonging to other unknown people ?

Spam e-mails seem to fall into three general groups; sexual aids, requests for help in transferring large sums of money, or “tips” for stock dealings. The requests for help in transferring large sums of money belonging to deceased relatives or co workers apparently originated in Nigeria, has now been adopted by others but is frankly so old that I would be surprised if there is anybody who has not experienced these type of requests or is unaware of whatever scam it is that is carried out on the respondents. Tips for stock dealings are a more recent development and I would imagine that these could be quite successful in helping to manipulate stock market prices to the benefit of the scammer. As for the sexual help spasm these are in most part laughable although no doubt they attract some buyers.

China as we all know is quite active in censoring undesirable internet sites, Falun Gong, or anything which may be considered seditious or pornographic. Is it beyond the technical competence of whoever it is who can control access and material on the Internet, to do a bit of censoring and block the time wasting and potentially very damaging hacker material? New scams will be developed continuously there is no doubt about that and I believe that there are now people in the USA who are looking at what can be done to control access to and material on the internet—that’s good I wish them every success.

The internet is a wonderful facility it is so useful in research, maintaining contacts with people and as a platform for amusement (my kids spend hours on games and children’s sites) and education. Used well it is a tremendous benefit to society but of course as with most things it is open to abuse, the scale of which is facilitated greatly by its world wide coverage. Very difficult now to imagine a life without it, but please lets do some cleaning up by trying to get some controls in place at source which would just prevent not only the hackers but also other undesirables from posting material which is clearly not in the wider public interest, and by this I mean child pornography, use by terrorists to publicise their causes, “snuff” material (films which show the actual killing of a human being) for which I just found four references on the first page of a Google search!, frauds and the like. I guess though that somebody would have the unenviable job of deciding what material is not in the wider public interest!

Germany mulls 'Trojan' IT viruses as anti-terror measure

Left-wing members of the ruling coalition have objected strongly to plans by the German interior ministry to enlist "Trojans", malicious programmes sent in electronic mail, to spy on terror suspects.

According to a proposed plank of new anti-terror legislation, which was confirmed by a ministry spokesman, special software would smuggle itself into a suspect's computer disguised as a harmless e-mail.

It would then feed information back to police servers whenever the computer was connected to the Internet.

The plans, which have circulated online and in the press in recent days, have met with sharp criticism both from the GdP police union and from Social Democrats (SPD), who are partners in the left-right ruling coalition.

Opponents argue that the plans would violate Germany's Basic Law and its privacy protections, particularly if the Trojan software was hidden in an official e-mail.

"The SPD will never lend a hand to changing the constitution simply to allow online searches," said Ralf Stegner, the interior minister of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.

The opposition Left Party said that such measures would destroy Germans' faith in the state.

"No one will trust e-mails from the authorities because they could be snoop attacks," said deputy Jan Korte, a member of the interior affairs committee in the Bundestag lower house of parliament.

GdP president Konrad Freiberg suggested passing the broader anti-terror legislation at least initially without the online search programme.

He did not want to hold up key crime-fighting measures because of the controversy over Trojan programmes.

Joerg Ziercke, director of the Federal Crime Office, defended the idea of Trojans in an interview with Stern magazine to be published Thursday.

He argued that so-called Remote Forensic Software could not be broadly used anyway because it would have to be tailored each time to the computer that had been targetted.

The anti-terror draft law also includes new powers for the federal police to involve itself in cases that poses a national threat even without a specific request from state police.

It would also allow them to launch probes based on suspect profiling if there was a specific threat of attacks and wiretap suspects' phones.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party and one of the most experienced members of her cabinet, raised hackles in July when he proposed more draconian measures.

In an interview with the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, he suggested the indefinite detention and "targeted killing" of terror suspects and a ban on the use of the Internet and mobile phones by suspect foreigners living in Germany.

Germany has strict checks on its security forces in part due to the flagrant abuses committed during the Nazi era, and under the communists in what was East Germany