Mobile Phone Virus

With the various announcements of serious security holes in the Bluetooth stacks of various smartphones, it will shortly become possible to write a mobile phone worm that spread itself via bluetooth. This new capability will open up at least two new markets, one for anti-virus software for mobile phones and another for worm applications that take advantage of running on a device that can spend money without assistance from the user.

The Spam Virus

The spam virus allows the 'owner' of the virus to :-

• Send spam text messages at the infectees expense.
• Spam the infectees phone book and the phone book of other bluetooth vulnerable phones in the vicinity of the infectee.
• Propagate to other smartphones in the area.
• Receive replies to the text messages and automatically forward them on to the spamming company for follow up.

How it works

The spam application would be Nokia Series 60 or similar, when installed on a phone it would sit and scan for other bluettooth devices. If it encounters a vulnerable phone that can run the application it would automatically install itself to that phone and set itself running. If it encounters any other bluetooth device it would attempt to download the address book from that phone. It can also bluejack vcards and application copies over to other phones in the vicinity.

At the same time, it would periodically scan an IRC channel or usenet group for marketing messages to send. When it receives a message to send it would slowly go through all the collected phone numbers it has text messaging them all out. It would also look out for responses to it's messages arriving back at the phone and then send the phone number of the success off to the above IRC channel.

This offloads the processing and sending cost of a text message marketing campaign to the owners of infected mobile phones while providing an extremely robust and fast network for sending due to it's distributed nature.

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